Oriental poppies: Glamour girls of the garden
Every spring I debate with myself about Oriental poppies, Papaver orientale. If an image doesn鈥檛 come immediately to mind, think big and gorgeous and sexy, the kind of bloom that -- and did -- paint.
My reservation about Oriental poppies isn鈥檛 about their visual libidinousness but with their liabilities as garden plants. Their bloom lasts only a moment, they are easily damaged by wind and rain, they have trouble standing up by themselves, and their post-flower foliage is weedy and lasts far too long.
Like movie actresses who rely on their looks, their moment in the sun is brief.
Ideal for those who love color
My small poppy collection includes a traditional orange, which I like least; several reds, including the old-timer 鈥楤eauty of Livermere鈥�; and the salmon-pink 鈥楥edric Morris鈥�. And 鈥樷��, a dusky purple cultivar that began as a volunteer in an English compost pile, another good argument for not sending green waste to the local landfill. ['Beauty of Livermere' and 'Patty's Plum' are shown above; to see the second and third photos, click on the arrow at the right base of the first photo.]
There are still more , including whites and cultivars with doubled petals, ruffled petals, and petals with edges that are fringed or serrated. Whatever the petal color, the flower鈥檚 center will be blotched with black or another dark color and contain a large, decorative seed capsule surrounded by dark-colored stamens.
Easy to grow but not to transplant
Maybe I haven鈥檛 dug out my poppies because they are so easy to grow, unparticular about soil and site, without serious bug and disease problems, drought-tolerant, and cope with both heat and cold (; ). They do best in full sun but remarkably well in partial shade.
Despite their reputation for not liking to have their roots disturbed -- transplanting large plants can be a gamble -- Oriental poppies are easy to . Also, all of today鈥檚 Oriental poppies are hybrids, which means their seeds won鈥檛 come true, but it is easy to grow plants from seed if you don't expect them to look like the parent plant. [See third photo above.]
Georgia O鈥橩eefe must have set up her easel in the garden because Oriental poppies aren鈥檛 ideal flowers for the vase. Open blooms begin to fall apart almost the minute you cut them, but if you鈥檙e keen for a bouquet, pick flowers with buds that are ready to open and sear the end of the stems before you place them in water.
After all, who can resist a gorgeous face, in the garden or on the screen?
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Karan Davis Cutler is one of more than a dozen garden experts who blog regularly at Diggin鈥� It. To read more by Karan, click here. She's a former magazine editor and newspaper columnist and the author of scores of garden articles and more than a dozen books, including 鈥淏urpee -- The Complete Flower Gardener鈥� and 鈥淗erb Gardening for Dummies.鈥� Karan now struggles to garden in the unyieldingly dense clay of Addison County, Vt., on the shore of Lake Champlain, where she is working on a book about gardening to attract birds and other wildlife.
