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Gardening With Dora Poppies honor fallen soldiers
One of the reasons I garden is to insure a supply of cut flowers for the house and nothing fills that bill quite like poppies. Their colors are vibrant; the blooms are big and flamboyant and they have this wonderful habit of rearranging themselves in the vase. Sometimes it seems that the long stems twist themselves about to give the viewer a better vista. Poppies are in the botanical family Papaver. Papaver in Latin means "paper" which speaks to the thin, paper like appearance of the petals. The rest of the botanical name is somniferum and that is because of the drug (opium) which is made from poppy seed. You can buy poppy seed but it is illegal to grow them. Now there's a dilemma for us. The corn poppy is the one with which we are most familiar. It is the red Flanders poppy, worn on Veterans Day to commemorate the fallen soldiers of World War I. Flanders, Belgium was the site of a particularly brutal battle and as so often happened in a battlefield, poppies sprung up everywhere when the dormant seeds were unearthed by trenching or the digging of graves. This phenomenon was immortalized in the poem, "In Flanders Field", a poem written by a Canadian officer who participated in the battle. I like the Shirley poppy, too. The color possibilities include salmon, rose, blush and crimson, edged in white. This plant was discovered in a field of corn poppies and the growth habit is the same as the corn poppy. It is possible to buy seeds of poppies that have double blooms. If you like the double forms, buy seeds with "paeoniflorum" instead of "somniferum" in the botanical name. That simply means that the blooms look like peonies. There are some wonderful bloom colors and configurations in any of these cultivars. I've never grown the double ones, but they look like they would flop over in the vase since the flowers are heavy. No planting of poppies is complete without the inclusion of the Oriental poppy. The flower production on this one is better - sometimes up to 20 blooms per plant. The flowers all have deep, black eyes and a seed mix that you purchase of this cultivar will include blooms in white, pink and rose. I'm taking out the annuals from my raised beds, overdressing them with composted cow manure and lime (poppies don't like acid soil). The beds will be ready when the seeds I've ordered have arrived and the ground freezes a time or two. Go to www.selectseeds.com to order seeds. Poppies need fertile, well-drained soil and full sun. Poppy seeds are tiny and any seed packet you buy will contain way more than anybody needs. (I give the excess to my gardening friends.) They need to be broadcast thinly and you can accomplish this by putting them out with a salt shaker or mixing the seeds with sand. There are perennial poppies, but all the ones mentioned above are annuals. The lettuce-like leaves will disappear in the summer and the plants will reseed. The seed pods are prized by people who produce dried flower arrangements. The pods are the size of big gum balls and when the top opens in summer it is possible to shake the seeds out. Don't take a drug test if you've been eating pastries with poppy seed. You will test positive. Dora Garrick Fleming is a Grove Hill native living in Winder, Ga.
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