Plant Poppies Now for Spring Flower Show
If you have a little bare earth, as I did last fall when my new front garden was filling in, let me suggest planting poppies for some spring pizazz.
I planted several kinds at this time of the year, though the red European field poppies with their flaming red flowers were the ones that bedazzled the neighborhood for weeks in spring.
These and many other poppies are best grown from seed, sown between now and early January. With any luck at all, winter’s rains will sprout them and all you have to do is prepare the soil. They’ll bloom in spring, then disappear by summer since these poppies are annuals.
Don’t get the idea, so often suggested in garden literature, that you can simply scatter the seed. It needs to come in contact with the soil, so weeds must be removed and the soil cultivated and raked smooth, with no clods or cracked, hard earth.
If you’ve had bagels with poppy seed or poppy-seed rolls, you know the seed is very small. Simply dragging the back of a rake lightly over the cultivated ground, or even the gentle force of a rain or irrigation, will cover them enough.
Being so pretty and easy to grow, you would think that getting seed would be a snap, but not so. Also called corn poppies and Flanders Field poppies, what you are looking for is plain Papaver rhoeas or the similar P. commutatum. While common in wildflower mixes, it can be hard to find individually packaged.
Check nursery racks, but one sure mail-order source is Larner Seeds, P.O. Box 407, Bolinas, CA 94924, (415) 868-9407. They specialize in true California native wildflowers; they also sell the pure, bright red European field poppies.
At a few nurseries, you may be able to find little six packs of the closely related P. commutatum ‘Lady Bird,’ which has black spots at the base of the red petals and is shorter, about 18 inches tall. The regular field poppies are at least 2 feet tall, sometimes 3, as are Shirley poppies.
Some Other Poppies
Don’t confuse Shirley poppies with field poppies. The Shirley poppies are much fancier forms, developed from one spotted in an English field that had a white edge. From it came poppies in all shades of red, pink and white, and many have double flowers or have different colored edges.
They are pretty in their own right but not as easy or stoplight bright. The latest in Shirley poppies is the strain from Thompson & Morgan, P.O. Box 1308, Jackson, NJ 08527-0308, (800) 274-7333, called ‘Angels Choir’ with double-flowered poppies in all sorts of soft colors, including apricots, they say.
I was going to grow them from seed this year, but found small plants in six-packs at Heard’s Country Gardens in Orange County, 14391 Edwards St., Westminster, (714) 894-2444. I got them in the ground just before that great rain last week.
Mary Lou Heard has been experimenting with different kinds of poppies for a couple of years and last year I took home plants of the giant but skinny P. somniferum. They made miserable-looking, 4-foot tall plants that consisted of one gangly stem of gray foliage (that needed staking). But when they flowered it was one of those moments in a gardener’s life when all you can say is “wow.”
Each plant made only a few huge flowers but they were stunning. All were peony-form with a plethora of petals. Later they made big opium-like seed heads (they are related), packed with the edible poppy seeds.
If you cut the stems as the buds show color and then singe them over a flame, they last a long time in a vase and I still have the globular seed heads--of those I didn’t cut--in a dried arrangement. Heard’s is again growing small plants of this poppy, though seed is available from several sources, including Thompson & Morgan and Park Seed Co., Cokesbury Road, Greenwood, SC 29647-0001.
Judy Wigand of Judy’s Perennials in San Marcos has a neat way of making sure the seeds of P. somniferum sprout. She scratches up the ground, sows seed, then covers it with a thin layer of white silica sand, “like flour on chicken.” The sand helps hold the seed in place and the white color reminds her that seed is present and needs watering if it doesn’t rain. You can also instantly see when seeds have sprouted.
She thins the seedlings to a couple of inches apart, then six inches to a foot apart after they’re several inches tall. As I said, the plants are naturally tall and skinny but she made a few bushier by pinching the tips off when they were a couple feet tall.
Don’t forget the California native, the easiest of all. Now is also the time to plant it and any other true wildflower. The plain orange is unbeatable but there are other colors and even frilly, double forms. ‘Ballerina’ is one, ‘Thai Silk’ another and ‘Apricot Chiffon’ is a new double from Park Seed.
Although you can find some California poppies at nurseries as small plants, seed is so easy that there is little point buying plants and they do much better sown right in the ground where they are to grow, which is true for most poppies.
