Tag: poppies

Meconopsis in Yellow and Blue

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date May 26, 2012
1 Comment on Meconopsis in Yellow and Blue

Blue meconopsis (Meconopsis grandis) are a challenge to grow and many gardeners are tempted to give it a go once they have seen them growing healthily. Their delicate almost see-through petals look too thin to survive the slightest whiff of wind or a drop of rain landing on them. Within their blue purity are slight hints and veins of red seen only when the light from the sun falls on them. In contrast to their blue petals golden centres and stigma grace the centre of each bloom.

To grow successfully the gardener must provide the exact conditions this poppy demands. Unfortunately our garden doesn’t have the right conditions at the moment, but we are working on it, so I took these pics at the RHS Malvern Spring Gardening Show.

Just as beautiful but very easy to grow are the yellow Welsh Poppies, Meconopsis cambrica. They self seed throughout our garden and we enjoy them appearing just where they choose to do so in May each year. Their yellow petals also display hints and veins of red when the sunlight falls on them. They too are almost transparent and look too delicate to survive everything the British weather subjects them to.

When they self seed they select their partners in the borders with care looking good wherever they land up. I wandered around our garden one sunny May day to see where they had chosen to appear this year. Although it is the most prolific self-seeder in our garden there is no way it can be called a weed, for if a weed is a plant in the wrong place, the Welsh Poppy always lands in the right place.

Where the blue poppy enjoys shade, its yellow Welsh relative opens out its flowers spreading the petals wide when the sun comes out but as evening falls they close back up to hide from the darkness. These delicately petalled poppies come in all shades of yellow from the palest lemon to almost orange, with one of the prettiest being the yellow with a slim fringe of orange.

While in the garden shooting pics for this post I couldn’t resist the temptation to include this exquisite double orange flowered beauty, which although a poppy is not a Meconopsis, but a papaver. Papaver rupifragum which I grew from seed eight years ago and they continue to appear each year.

And while photographing these I spied through the corner of my eye the first plant of our native red poppy to be flowering. It looks equally good in bud, flower or seedpod. This poppy is known botanically as Papaver rhoeas, but seems to collect common names including Field Poppy, Corn Poppy and Flanders Poppy.

The wonderful Welsh Poppy greets us each morning as we enter the garden through the stable door. What a cheerful way for the garden to say welcome us!

Tags garden photography, gardening, meconopsis, papaver, poppies

garden photography gardening outdoor sculpture photography

Poppy Seedhead Skeleton

Sometimes the smallest and simplest of discoveries in the garden can blow you away. Pulling up a clump of small dandelion leaves to give to the chicks as a treat, I spied this seedhead of an oriental poppy. Nature had turned it into a skeletal sculpture. Rotting had revealed little windows through which patterns emerged.

It is hard to believe that these little capsules were but a few months ago hidden deep inside the bright orange over-sized blooms. Looking past this orange glare into the poppy’s secret centre, we could see a black core dusted with purple. Already the shape of the green seed head was evident. Once the floppy orange silk of the petals drooped lifelessly they fell to feed the soil beneath. Now the gaunt rigid stems were topped with the green seed heads which would dry to tinder in the following summer months. When dried, the capsules rattling with seeds, seeds by the million, turned pale biscuit. The rotting rains of autumn softened the stems which the winds then felled. The wetness of the ground rotted the capsule’s flesh away leaving these wonderful skeletal shapes.

Tags garden photography, gardening, natural sculpture, poppies, winter gardens

autumn gardening

Autumn bonuses

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date October 30, 2011

We changed the clocks last night by that hour that marks the end of British summer time, but it didn’t mean we were really into typical weather and light for late autumn. We woke to drizzle but by lunchtime the sun was up and giving some warmth and the sky was blue. So a bonus session in the garden beckoned. And what a bonus day – gardening without jackets at the end of October – can’t be bad! And coffee out in the garden accompanied by pears and grapes freshly plucked from the cordon and vine – it gets better!

But the signs of autumn carried on all around us, the gentle watery song of the robin, the calls of redwing and fieldfare overhead. There are bonus flowers to appreciate too. Leading the way is the double orange flowered poppy, Papaver rupifragum. It simply shines. In bud it reveals a little of its silky amber secrets hidden within the tight hairy buds.

When it opens it is an orange sun. It outshines whatever sits alongside it. As a self-seeder it appears in different places each year – where it chooses not where we choose. It is better than us at knowing good neighbours.

Now to move from the riduculous to the sublime, the ridiculously bright and downright gaudy papaver to the gentlest of our garden perennials, the gaura. We love it in the summer for its gentle airy white flowers variously tinted with shades of pink, its delicate swaying in the gentlist breeze but we never think of it as a star of the autumn. But just look at these photos, the flower and the seed head bathing in and absorbing the lowering rays of the sun. This year we have seen it in a new light, the light of autumn.

Tags autumn, gaura, poppies

gardening hardy perennials

Sunshine in the borders

Post author By greenbenchramblings
Post date July 28, 2011

Sometimes the simplest and most common of plants are the stars of the garden. This yellow Welsh Poppy, Meconopsis cambrica, comes to life in the low-angled rays of sunshine at the beginning and end of the day. Considered by many gardeners to be a weed because it happily and freely self-seeds wherever it is happy, this diminutive gem has the knack of placing itself brilliantly. We wouldn’t be without it.