![]() The orientals have an old-time charm, and "Perry's White" and the more recently introduced "Patty's Plum" are worth a position where you can afford to have a gap later. You can hear the bees making busy in just-opened flowers, the chamber of petals magnifying their activity. ![]() "Goliath" will reach well over a metre, with deep red goblets which have a black eye if you open them up with your fingers. Of the perennial poppies, P orientale is perhaps the most dramatic, rearing up from a rough clump of foliage in the first part of the summer. To grow the annual poppies successfully, never mulch where you want them or you will incarcerate the seed in darkness. The pepper-pot seed heads are wonderful as autumnal skeletons later. Unless you are happy to have a medley of colours, stick to one of the named selections and weed out those that come up mauve, as the double reds, blacks and whites are spectacular for the fortnight they are in flower. Friends in the States and Europe grow them "at risk", as they are still illegal in some places, but I am pleased to say that this isn't the case here. ![]() I have a good dark form and let them seed about in the gaps. Over time, and if you let them self-seed, the strongest genes will predominate and you will get more of the reds than the curiously "off" colours that are so noteworthy, so it is worth buying a new packet of seed every few years and re-sowing in March or September by casting them on to newly broken ground.Īs I write, the last of the opium poppies are fluttering to the ground to leave their blue-grey pods to ripen. The pink and red Shirley poppies couldn't be prettier, but my favourites are the "Fairy Wings" selections, as the colours range from pretty picotee pinks through to mauves and washed-out blue-grey. Most are light on their feet and will be gone and seeding by the time the later perennials take over, and they have a way about them that deformalises a planting and gives the garden a lived-in appearance. ![]() They like a well-drained, open position and make a good early complement to plants that are slower off the mark. Where the conditions are right, I like to use the annual poppies in perennial borders. Annuals produce seed aplenty and they return without having to re-sow after tilling and autumn rains. In autumn, after the seed has dropped, he rotovates to simulate the plough of an arable field so that the seed is exposed to light and disturbance. A friend has a strip alongside his vegetable garden that he sowed for two or three years with a seed mix of cornfield annuals. This is why you will see them painting a new motorway embankment or transforming the rubble left after the bulldozers have flattened a building site.Ĭlients often ask me if they can have poppies in their meadows, but once the sward has stabilised the seed will remain dormant still, there are many ways to work the annual poppies into a garden. The annual poppies are dependent upon disturbed ground and, as pioneers, they will seize the moment whenever the seed comes to the surface. Our native Papaver rhoeas is a delightful cornfield annual, the seed lasting in the ground for as long as 50 years when buried or kept in darkness by vegetation. T he poppies were good this year, slashing the fields red and marking out those that the farmers hadn't sprayed with herbicide.
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