poppies – Summerhouse Art

Are my titles starting to sound like they could be Nancy Drew Mysteries? Hmm. Never mind. A while ago I posted a story about our Accidental Poppy Garden. We’ve been enjoying this poppy garden for a few weeks now and actually gotten quite a few positive comments on it from people passing by, on their way to the park next to us. It’s nice to know that other people can appreciate the disarray of a surprise garden.

Each time we go out in the car or out for a walk we have been making our way through this bountiful poppiness and have glanced at them, maybe making a passing remark about how many different ones there were. But one day, we really looked at them. Really noticed them. And then we started to count just how many different types of poppies that had actually sprung up in our accidental garden. What we found was amazing, really, and just a bit mysterious.

We counted 11 different poppies! Ok some were just different colors but others were quite original. Now neither Bill and I know the exact names of plants and often get creative and give them our own names. Some were just subtle differences, like the color among the single petal ones. Others were what we had referred to as “double poppies” or “poms” as in pom poms, in that they were much like peonies or a rose with many petals. A few seemed to be a mixture of the single and double in that there was a ring of single flatter petals surrounding a nucleus of many petals packed in tightly curled pom poms. Bill called those Pom Combinations. One little poppy was a single petal pattern with a sawtooth edge, that sported a dark center, that he called Red Rag. Another was named Red Floppsy since it’s inner petals flopped. No, it’s too hard to explain them. Why not show the photos?

Nine of the eleven varieties that mysteriously appeared

Which brings me to the mystery. Bill says when he went out to sow the seeds he only had about 4 or 5 poppy pods of seeds in his hand. How did we end up with so many varieties? Had some cross pollinated in the back garden? Where did the Purple Pom, as we called it, come from? Neither of us remember it from the back garden, which is where all the seed pods had originated. Had long forgotten seeds in the compost that we’d spread around gifted us with these other varieties? Who knows?

Curiousity caused us to investigate our poppy plethora. We looked them up and found that the proper names for what we were calling Poms were actually Peony Poppies. The other interesting thing I discovered is that our names are tame next to some. We found names like Drop Dead Gorgeous or White Cloud Peony or Heavenly Angels Peony or even Irish Cream Peony Poppies or the best, Prince of Orange. So from now on when it comes to creating names for plants, I’m going to have a lot more fun.

The only trouble is that now we know there are even more kinds of them out there and it’s going to be hard to resist trying out some others. Will there be room for anything but poppies if we allow this new poppy addiction to grow?

Which brings me to another quote I’m rather fond of, especially when faced with a box of chocolates or for that matter a web site full of irresistible poppy seeds.

“I can resist everything except temptation”. – Oscar Wilde

Sometimes, when we design a new garden we may have a very loose idea of where we’re going and try to create that. In the case of the front garden it was to make a garden that could stand up to the dryness in summer and still survive the wet Victoria winter and solve the dead grass problem. This is a story not just about creating the garden but the something unexpected that happened, another serendipitous garden event.

The old front garden was a short length of flower bed, a tangle of day lilies on one side and lavender on the other, and not much else, that stopped abruptly as it reached the part of the yard that is supposedly owned by the municipality. That area was always a problem. It was hard hard dirt with miserable grass on it mixed with weeds that we poured water on every summer. It looked awful, dried out and ugly, the water couldn’t really sink in and the grass didn’t benefit from all this expensive water. So last fall or maybe it was late summer, Eric and Bill dug up huge portions of it so that we could make a xeriscape garden. They almost broke shovels doing it, the dirt was so hard. There was not an earthworm to be found, finding it impossible to get through this cement-like soil.

We had been saving and finding plants to put into this garden, things that were supposed to do well in a xeriscape or low watering garden. Things like day lilies, yucca, grasses, red hot poker, irises, and crocosmia.

When it was all dug up and ready to plant, Hart, our good friend who has a knack with gardening and arranging plants, was called in to supervise. We like to call him the “Lone Arranger”.

Each plant was put in it’s own hole that was first filled with our own compost. We didn’t have enough compost to do up the whole area so we cheated a bit and just put it in where the plants were going.

So it was all done, everything planted. We only had to eventually move some yuccas that had been planted around the pampas grass and were now hidden by it. We sat back, exhausted and enjoyed our handiwork.

Sometime in November or December, Bill went out and sprinkled poppy seeds around the whole area. The seeds were all mixed up, saved from poppies that had grown in the back garden.

This spring not much showed of these, until about the last month or two. Then we saw all sorts of poppy plants coming up. And being haphazard and ok, maybe a bit time-crunched too, the sprouts of these luckily missed being weeded out.

Imagine our surprise and delight this month, when, in this awful clay dirt we had huge poppies of all sorts. They came up in lipstick colors of red, mauve and fuchsia.

Double and single flowers popped up (they are poppies after all) amongst all the planned xeriscape we’d worked so hard to create. It was a gorgeous sight! We had expected a few poppies, but nothing like the amount we got. We’d accidentally created a poppy garden.

Poppies are a short lived phenomenon. They come up, their gracefully drooping flower pods lift up and burst into bloom, petals like silky tissue paper. And too shortly thereafter, it seems, they are done blooming and set themselves to seed in gorgeous seed pods.

I swear they are the only flower that looks beautiful in every stage. But you’ve got to be quick and get out there and enjoy enjoy.

Tag: poppies

The Mystery of the Poppies

The Accidental Poppy Garden