Annual Poppies as Landscape Focus
Annual Poppies efficiently unify contrasting parts of natural plantings, and add color and romance to settings
Jul 27, 2006
Using advance planning and clever design, gardeners can simply and effectively integrate annual poppies into landscapes. Gardeners must also know the preferences as well as idiosyncrasies of the plants utilized.
Poppies planted with summer annuals of contrasting colors like Calendula officinalis (calendula), Consolida x hybrida (garden larkspur) and Centaurea cyanus (cornflower / bachelor-button) appear to last longer in cool protected locations like walled northern and seaside gardens. Here are some marvelous examples:
- Glenlyon House gardens in the Scottish Perthshire Hill Country exhibits two annual poppy borders, each about eighty feet in length. The English Garden Magazine, September, 2004 featured these borders along with parallel herbaceous borders, raised vegetable beds and tactics of gardener Mark Nicholson To achieve these ribbons of yearly color, Nicholson direct sows about 4,000 poppy seeds yearly into the beds and transplants seedlings of Centaurea 'Black Ball,' larkspur and calendula. To maintain the looks of these borders, Nicholson hoes out self-sown seedlings from the previous year. Though the beds are in a location enclosed by walls and beech hedges, the winds wreak disorder, especially in the poppy beds. Having once staked almost every plant, Nicholson now forms, early in the growing season, lattices with bamboo canes and baling twine around and through the beds. This supports the plants and once the foliage has matured, the lattice is hardly visible.
- Celia Laighton Thaxter, New Hampshire's (USA) best-known 19th century poet, writes quite a bit about annual poppies, especially the Shirley strain, in her book An Island Garden. Thaxter's garden on Appledore Island ultimately grew to be 50 feet long and 15 feet wide, facing south and surrounded by a fence bordered with sweet peas and other summer flowers. Beds within the fence contained her favorite 'Shirley poppies.' Here is what she writes about planting them: I have planted and am going to continue planting till the middle of June, in this year of grace 1893, no less than two whole ounces of Shirley Poppies in all, and when one reflects that the seeds are so small as to be hardly more than visible to the naked eye, one realizes this to be a great many. A bank at the southwest corner of the garden sloped away from the fence. Thaxter favored seeing 'Shirley poppies' here as well and planned for their succession of bloom. I finished the afternoon by planting Shirley Poppies all up and down the large bank at the southwest of the garden, outside. I am always planting Shirley Poppies somewhere! One never can have enough of them, and by putting them into the ground at intervals of a week, later and later, one can secure a succession of bloom and keep them for a much longer time,--keep, indeed, their heavenly beauty to enjoy the livelong summer,--whereas, if they are all planted at once you would see them for a blissful moment, a week or ten days at most, and then they are gone.
The demonstration herb garden at Old Sturbridge Village (MA) shows beds of low-growing herbs dotted with the red flecks of Papaver rhoeas (corn poppies). This plant was essential in early 19th-century communities and served as a total pharmacy. It was common sense, as well as pleasant to the eye, to allow it to reseed at will, therefore insuring a constant supply of flowers and seed.
Corn poppies contain different and less potent alkaloids than its cousin Papaver somniferum and its flowers are utilized in syrups and infusions. Red-flowered poppies, especially, provided color for wines and medicines. The tiny seeds, both whole and ground, provided filling for baked goods, condiments, curries and sauces.
You may enjoy reading more about poppies and wildflower meadows in my previous articles:
- Integrate Poppies in the Lanscape
- Poppies and Landscape Design
- Landscapes of Poppies
- Poppies and Landscapes of War
- Romantic or Realist - Establishing a Wildflower Lawn or Meadow
©
Text and photograph by Georgene A. Bramlage, July 26, 2006. Reproduction without permission prohibited.
