Annual poppies

Poppies come in many colours, can be great for cutting and drying, and their unpredictability makes them fascinating to grow.

- Graham Rice

ISN’T every year The Year of The Poppy? Well, it certainly should be. But the year 2022 was assigned by the seed companies as The Year of The Poppy, so let’s belatedly jump at the opportunity to take a look at annual poppies of all kinds.

The scarlet corn poppies, the Flanders poppies of the First World War trenches and the days before weedkillers, still sometimes blaze across the countryside. As was the case in Flanders, when digging trenches turned up buried seeds that had not seen light of day for decades, one season of deeper-than-usual ploughing creates the same effect.

Stop and look
And if you come across a field of red poppies, as you walk in the countryside this summer, stop and take a close look. Twice I’ve spotted just one whiteflowered plant in a field of red – in exactly the same way that back in 1879 The Reverend William Wilks, vicar of Shirley, in Surrey, spotted one poppy plant with a white edge to its petals. He collected seeds from this one plant and used it to create his ‘Shirley’ poppies.

Recently, corn poppies have become available in more astonishing new colours which have supercharged their popularity. The other popular group is the breadseed poppies (Papaver somniferum), sometimes wrongly called opium poppies – they produce the poppy seeds we see on bagels as well as wonderful blue-grey foliage and large flowers in some stupendous colours, singles and doubles.