Corn Poppies

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Georgia O’Keefee painted some brilliant portraits of red Poppies some times upto 3 feet wide and high, even bigger than the real thing in my garden.The last photo shows how Red and Green work well together on a canvas or in a garden setting. Oriental poppies are perennial and most Poppy species are easy to grow from seed of which 50 varieties are available from Thompson & Morgan

The Poppy Appeal supporting the British Legion

Think before you allow poppies to proliferate. Poppies rob a lot of goodness from your soil.

This is largely from a post I did in 2013 with some updates. Seeing the colour in my garden and watching the single flowers close up for the evening I decided to buy some more seeds for next summer (I hope I can find the space to do them justice) I opted for ‘Copper Swirl’ by TM and for an extra 99p I got ‘Golden West Californian Poppy’ thrown in.  I am tempted to sow half of each packet shortly although the blurb on the packet suggests waiting until Feb or March next year.

Blue Heaven: Encounters with the Blue Poppy by Bill Terry from amazon Bill Terry is a leading North American authority on Asiatic poppies relates his own encounters with the blue poppy and shows how, given a suitable climate, a patient and persistent gardener can raise this most alluring of perennial plants. The origins of Meconopsis are expounded along with comments about those who first discovered and grew the plants. A personal account, fun to read and adds to the collective knowledge.

This is a view of a corner in my Yorkshire garden that shows some recycling activity. I have tried various compost bin methods over the years. Initially I started with an open pile which was untidy and slow. At about this time I acquired a shredder which chopped up brown twiggy waste but only  squelched leaves.

Poppies are easy to grow, sometimes too easy  because they self sow all over my garden and despite the delicate petals I thought of them as weeds. So much so that I forgot to photograph any earlier this year but now have captured some pictures of perfectly purple poppies.

There are 7 or 8 different conifers in this photo from a total of 16. The whole bed is roughly rectangular 6 yards by 5 yards. It has one unusual feature in that the soil is very shallow and poor.

Silver Queen Corn is a favorite; the 8-inch tapered ears fill to the tip with 14-16 rows of tender, sweet white kernels with excellent flavor. Kernels contain moderate degrees of sugar and convert to starch rapidly after harvest; taste best when fresh.

I have said before that I know what birds like, and have created a slideshow of the variousCornus, or dogwood, species that I grow–all of them good wildlife plants. But since the berries produced by Cornus alba and Cornus sericea, both twig dogwoods, really don’t catch my eye, I was interested to see that gray catbirds and tufted titmice, in particular, are positively wild about the unassuming white fruit.I grow a few varieties of Cornus alba andC. sericea, including the variegated-leaf, gold-twig ‘Silver and Gold,’ the gold-leaf, red-twig sericea called ‘Sunshine’ (above, in fruit; Cornus

I noticed that my friend Bob Hyland at nearby Loomis Creek Nursery is counting his twiggy blessings, too, this week—with an ode on his website to Salix ‘Swizzlestick,’ a distinctive corkscrew willow he grows as a dramatic 60-foot hedge.I’m making myself content with much less, but even a little ‘Winter Flame’ (hardy to Zone 4) warms the winter-weary soul. My young plant hasn’t reached full size of 8-10 feet, though at 4 feet it produces a show of yellow-, orange- and reddish-tinged stems that read as coral to my eye.The Dutch breeder of ‘Winter Flame,’ Andre van Nijnatten, has also developed a smaller-stature version called Cornus ‘Arctic Sun’ that is earning high pr