We are not growing poppies this year. We will not be growing poppies any year, despite my love of poppies: a front garden bed of waving Iceland poppy heads, defying winter glooms; the massive heads of the many, many kinds of poppy you can buy for spring, or summer too. A single poppy plant can be so extravagant that passers-by stop to gawk.
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This is where – decades after the fact – I am about to reveal a shocking incident in my past. Possibly unwisely …
But first some background on the role of a gardening writer. The first time I'll see the gorgeous pic that will probably accompany this article will be when it is published.
And that's what happened, decades ago. I wrote an article, the pic was added of a stunning garden, all roses and azaleas, penstemons and hollyhocks. And there, in the corner, a fabulous red poppy …
The police rang a week later. A bit embarrassed. A reader had seen the pic, recognised the poppy as an ornamental giant form of Oriental poppy – illegal to grow, even though it doesn't have the same chemical mix as its close relative, the opium poppy. The reader had phoned their MP, the MP had phoned the police, and the police had chosen a most tactful representative to make enquiries …
It got worse. The poppy photo had been taken in the sometimes public, slightly famous, garden of a Most Important Public Personage of great official respectability, grown from a packet of seeds sold by a Most Respectable Seed Company, available in all good garden centres and supermarkets. Yet illegal they still were.
I said I hadn't seen the photo till the article was published, and um, yes, as far as I could tell from the photo the poppy was an Oriental poppy so there was no way to make the whole mess go away. And no, sorry, I had never met the Most Important Personage so wasn't going to break the news to them that they had an illegal poppy. The police regretfully accepted that role was theirs.
And that is all I know about it. Presumably the Most Important Personage was never charged. The poppy seeds were at least temporarily removed from sale. The publishers of the gardening book (not one of mine) who were going to use the photo on their front cover decided to use another, with no poppies whatsoever in it. I suppose the plant was pulled out … and I vowed never, ever to write about poppies, just in case. Or grow them, just in case their pedigree wasn't … quite …
(NB The poppy was NOT in our garden. Have fun working out a short list of who the Most Important Respectable Gardener of a couple of decades ago might have been.)
There is another reason why I don't grow poppies. Poppies are easy to grow – wild poppies flourish in disturbed ground, like the poppies that bloomed in the devastation of no-man's-land in France, or on the hillsides years ago when I rambled among them in Crete and Greece.
But …
Rule number 1 – the ground must be bare, of weeds and anything else. I rarely have ground like that – too much is planted with perennials, from asparagus to salvias.
Rule number 2 – scatter the seed, don't bury it. Most failed poppy crops are caused by careful gardeners neatly
covering the seed.
Rule number 3 – do not grow any plant that grows easily on disturbed, barren ground, refer to Rule number 1 above, if you live near genuine bushland. These species are a genuine threat in the weeds department and can easily colonise hundreds of kilometres of roadsides, railway tracks and other bare ground at will before they wander off into bushland – just think of the bright yellow coreopsis, stately white Lilium formosanum, pretty blue agapanthus and red gladiolus all flaunting themselves along roads, tracks and drainage ditches as they make a bid for freedom after becoming renegade garden escapees.
But if you do decide your garden is appropriate for poppies: Scattering very tiny seed indeed is easier if you mix it with dry sand, but even then a gust a wind can mean the seed clumps together and you need to thin the seedlings and transplant.
As I am many months from being able to kneel in the garden, this task is beyond me. if I had bare ground, which I haven't, and if I was going to risk poppies, which I still probably wouldn't.
But if you are a diligent gardener and you do have bare ground and you adore the flagrant gloriousness of a giant poppy, or the many fluttering heads of single poppies, this is an excellent time to plant them, a pinch of seed for about each 30cm, or the length of the average booted foot.
Thin them out to about 30 cm apart when they are about thumb height. They can be closer together – wild ones often are – but if you want the maximum number of flowers possible, thinning works.
In cool climates your poppies won't flower till spring; in frost-free areas they may flower sooner. Choose the clichéd fertile, moist soil, too – poppies will grow and flower on rocky hillsides but remember they did best in that tragic mud of Flanders.
Maybe that, too, is why I can't grow poppies. I have read too much about those battlefields, and can't forget.
This week I am:
- not planting poppies, onion seeds or seedlings, asparagus plants, artichoke plants or other winter goodies. It's cold out there, and the soil is colder still on the knees;
- watching the spinebills stick their beaks into the winter red hot pokers, that are more yellow and orange than red, and don't look like pokers either, none of which bothers the spine bills at all. I planted two of every winter blooming variety I could find years ago and they have multiplied to my joy and the birds';
- judging the lyrebirds' entries in the Best Song of Winter Competition (the one behind the woodshed is currently ahead on points);
- approving of the choice of Tahitian limes in fruiting through winter, just when we need more Vitamin C;
- enjoying giving away avocadoes – and yes, we go down to minus (but the trees still bear … if you put in seven years of protecting them as they acclimatize); and
- extremely glad I put in lots of spring onions and parsley as I am adding great bunches to soups and stews.
