Poppies: the one spring fling you really need

It's time to start throwing seeds around with reckless abandon

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Notes:

• Today’s full newsletter is only available to paid subscribers and members of The Wild Garden club.

• It’s a guide to one of my favourite flower groups to plant during autumn for spring colour…poppies!! But not all poppies are created equal, so read on to find out which are the easiest, which are the frilliest and which just aren’t worth your time.

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Today I want to talk to you about poppies.

Poppies are a FANTASTIC flower to grow in Perth because most of them don’t even care that what we call soil is really a mixture of sand, eucalyptus leaves and crushed gardening dreams. They aren’t totally water-wise - you’ll still need to water them, but a few of them do so well in these here parts that they’re basically weeds (lookin’ at you Flanders Poppy!).

They also happen to be one of those flowers that cheerfully heralds the start of spring, provides pollen for the bees that have decided to venture out into the cold to warm themselves by the clear light of the late August sun, and, well, they’re just so damn pretty!

Here are some of my favourite kinds of poppies to grow - add some into your garden too.

Growing poppies

As I’ve already mentioned, poppies thrive in most soil types. They really aren’t too picky. Unless you try to grow the notoriously picky (and utterly beautiful) blue Himalayan poppies, which, if you live in Perth, is inadvisable.

Some general rules of thumb for most poppies are: sow them direct (they have a tap root and so don’t like to be transplanted), in full sun. They don’t mind sandy(ish) soil but will still appreciate being watered (try to avoid overhead watering if possible). Once they begin to bloom, pick pick pick to encourage more blooms. And at the end of the season, leave the last flowers to sit on the plant and turn into gorgeous dried seed heads so that you can save the seeds and grow more next season (the seed heads are also very beautiful in their own right and deserve a place in your garden). If you get frosty winters, sow your poppy seeds in spring for flowers in late-spring/summer. If you have frost-free winters you can sow them in autumn for early spring flowers. Poppies don’t appreciate pots, so grow them in your garden beds wherever possible (if you have a potted garden, use very deep pots so that their tap roots have plenty of room to grow down into the soil).

For the beginner poppy-grower, the best two to start with in your gardens are Field Poppies (aka Flanders Poppies, aka The Red Ones), and opium poppies.

That’s right! Opium poppies! But we’ll get to that in a sec.

Flanders Field Poppies

Flanders Field Poppies

Flanders Field Poppies are the most well known, because of their special significance in remembering fallen soldiers on remembrance day. These are one of those ‘sow once and grow forever’ flowers that self-seeds SO easily and will appear in your garden year after year, every spring. In fact, I never even planted the Flanders poppies growing in my garden - they blew in from a neighbour’s yard!

The thing I love about these poppies is that they have a wonderful way of tying a spring garden together. They pop up in all the empty spaces of your patch, and their happy red heads dotted throughout your garden help to unify and fill the whole place.

It’s a bit like unintentional matrix planting (where you add a plant throughout your garden in a matrix to provide repetition and consistency throughout). Even if the rest of your garden feels cluttered or haphazard, scatter Flanders poppies around willy-nilly in autumn and in spring your patch will look uniformly red and beautiful - like a wildflower meadow! They also look amazing planted alongside bright blue cornflowers (great juxtaposition) so consider adding both to your garden for spring!