volunteer poppy

[Tybee]

this little volunteer showed up in last year's garden where I threw out a lot of old seed--I think he is a cross between my red and pink poppies from Michigan as they grew in the same are of the garden, and I always grab the pods for next year. I moved him to a pot and did not think he would survive, but he bloomed today:
poppy.jpg

[catherine]

So cute!!

[iris lilies]

That is so charming! I love love love poppies. I have an old variety of double, that comes in pinks and reds, growing in my city garden.

[Tybee]

That is so charming! I love love love poppies. I have an old variety of double, that comes in pinks and reds, growing in my city garden.

I think poppies are my new favorite flower. Those doubles are amazing--I have seeds saved from an heirloom double from Michigan, from the National Park seashore park there with the old farmsteads. Oh my goodness it is so beautiful.

[rosarugosa]

What a beautiful surprise!

[early morning]

Lovely, Tybee! I love poppies but have little luck with them.

[iris lilies]

Lovely, Tybee! I love poppies but have little luck with them.

They are ridiculously tricky. Oh, the stories I could tell about trying to get poppies started!

After all these years and many tries decades ago, I still have no perennial poppies. I will never have any perennial poppies, that’s just life. Life has denied Iris Lilies perennial poppies and isn’t that sad?

But mother nature does allow Iris to have some annual poppies, so I should dedicate myself to making that work. Right now I have such a mat of leaves in my Hermann front garden that no annual Larkspur or poppies were able to come up. Next year we will do better. But I do have those doubles about two weeks away from blooming in my city garden

One of the things I love about Hermann is the old fashioned flowers in some of the gardens around there. There’s one house that has big orange perennial poppies. They are just so rare anymore! Used to be in Iowa we saw them all over, especially in abandoned farm houses. Those orange poppies, plus pallida iris, plus peony bushes as big as my car.

[early morning]

I had a big patch of perennial poppies here, when we moved in 30 yrs ago. It has shrunk over the years, and several years ago some tree-trimmers tore it up even more. Now it's a little patch, and I don't know how to encourage it. We don't mow it until the heads are really dry and the leaves have dried also. I try to keep the bit stuff (hemlock, dock) cut out of it, but can't remove the grass. I do try to cut the grass heads before they seed, and I try to make sure the poppy pods hit the ground. Other than this, does anyone know how I can encourage this bed to grow, or at least not disappear? It's under a big maple and gets more sun now than it used to, due to the poor tree having lost a lot of itself. But I thought poppies loved sun, so I am confused. And everything I read says they don't like to be wet, and that part of the yard used to be quite soggy, and now it's a bit better drained. I think they just don't like us, lol.

[nswef]

I dug up all the orange poppies about 30 years ago...they grew like mad in a bed next to the house that got morning sun. I'm in piedmont Md and the peonies are growing like mad, too and the daffodils swallowed the lavender, so that is my job today. I can seldom get annual poppies. One fluffy pink and one exquisite single red showed up last year. But we'll see if they return.