Poppies are some of the most colourful and easy to grow flowers for your garden. Some will multiply and come up year after year with no help from you, others will pop up in places you don’t expect and others can be carefully planted where you want them.
The easiest poppy is the Welsh Poppy – Papaver cambricum. This is a lovely yellow, nodding flower which is a perennial which means that it will come up every year in May and give your borders a bright, cheerful colour accent. The leaves are grey and feathered and precede the flowers – the seed heads are upright and will send out seeds for next year. You can cut the leaves back in June or July and they will reappear next April. This poppy will grow anywhere!
If you dig up a border or an area of lawn you might get self- sown red poppies – these are the ‘Flanders poppies’ – Papaver rhoeas – seen on the edges of cornfields and will turn up in your garden after you have cleared and dug an area of ground. They will only flower once unless you dig and sow seeds each year. They have a simple red flower and a drooping seed-head which produces seed which can last, un-germinated, or many years.
Some poppies come up and flower for one year only and are called ‘annual’ poppies. In addition to the red field poppies Papaver rhoeas, there are two others – the Californian poppy and the “opium’ poppy.
The Californian poppy is orange and very pretty with feathered leaves – you need to sow seeds every year. It is called Eschscholzia californicaand you buy seeds and sow where you want it to flower in either October for flowers in early summer the next year or in spring to flower in mid to late summer the same year .
The “Opium” poppy – Papaver somniferum will sow itself in gravel or borders and new plants will pop up every year – the seed heads will produce over one hundred new plants in the right conditions.
Most Opium poppies are self sown and you will see them at this time of year as a grey plant with feathered leaves growing in dry borders or gravel.
Unfortunately this poppy has a tap root and it will rarely survive digging up and replanting so you have to leave it where it is where it will grow to about 60 cm and have a lovely pink, lilac or deep purple flower. Leave the “pepper pot “ seed head on and it will send out seed for next year.
Finally we have the perennial oriental poppies, Papaver orientale which are very glamorous and once planted will increase every year and provide you with lovely red or pink photogenic flowers in May and June. The flowers are large with tissue paper like petals in pink or red some having black spots.
These poppies can be grown from seed but you are better to get a “cutting “ from a local gardener friend – then you can plant out in September and you will get flowers in June the next year.
Once the flowers have finished you can cut the leaves right back and you will get new leaves in July .You can also grow from seed but it will take longer. Friends may ask you for seed-heads but don’t cut them until about August and warn your friends that they will have to wait a few years for new poppy plants and they may be a different colour.
Do try a few poppies in your garden – bright and cheerful and very easy to grow.