Poppy: varieties, growing and uses

Red, wrinkled or sharply marked

Ordinary Papaver rhoeas provides classic scarlet red. Shirley Group is a collection of selected flower forms and colours, including doubles; it is not one uniform cultivar. Papaver commutatum is a different botanical species with striking black at the base of red petals. These differences are visible without inventing an unreliable special cultivar name.

Sow an accessible strip

A narrow space beside a path lets you see the delicate flowers close up. Mark out the patch before sowing and put a label at both ends. Later, you can recognise an apparently empty patch as a sowing space. Do not scatter seed everywhere at once if you still need to hoe regularly between young vegetables.

From bud to seed capsule

Observe drooping buds, open flowers and dry capsules in sequence in your journal. This keeps plants interesting after petals fall. Short blooms disappoint less when you follow development and several plants flower successively.

Colour as a small experiment

Sow a red patch beside Shirley mix and photograph equally distant. Later assess which best suits green vegetable foliage. Save seed experimentally; reorder the same named mix when predictability matters more than surprise.

Scent, flavour and use

These poppies are selected as ornamental flowers. Do not use flowers, leaves, sap or seed pods as edible garnishes; no flavour claim is made. Saving seed in this article means saving sowing seed, not preparing it for the kitchen.

Care, cutting and harvesting

Sow directly where the plants can grow, in sunny, well-drained soil. Keep the sowing moist at the start and thin young plants. Poppies tolerate root disturbance poorly, so a small direct-sown strip is often easier than repeated transplanting.

No formative pruning is needed. Deadheading can prolong flowering in Shirley types, but do not remove pods marked for seed. Pull unwanted seedlings from vegetable rows early. A fixed winter calendar does not suit these annuals.

To save your own sowing seed, let a few pods dry on the plant. Collect ripe, dry seed in a paper bag, label and store dry. You can also leave some pods for garden interest. Seedlings from a mixture do not necessarily retain the same flower appearance.