Dazzling poppyworts!

Argemone munita

In 1986 Marvin Black (city arborist for Seattle) persuaded Dilys Davies--a retired physician and passionate gardener who lived in the Lake District) to attend our international Rock Garden Conference. Dilys was a fetching Englishwoman in the mold of Viola ("Twelfth Night") or perhaps a Jane Austen heroine in her flair and charisma.

Out of all the thousands of plants at Denver Botanic Gardens, it was an unintentional colony of prickly poppy (re-emerged from the soil bank) which most charmed her: I will never forget her English soprano voice proclaiming: "What is this dazzling white poppywort?!"...

For years we continued to call Argemone "dazzling white poppyworts" in her honor. Dilys lives on in my memory whenever prickly poppies come in to bloom (I also think of her when I have to research an ornamental onion, about which she wrote a garden monograph: The Ornamental Onions, Batsford Press, 1992.)

A week or two after Dilys passed through, the poppies were still in bloom. A family of what turned out to be prairie farm folk from Eastern Colorado came by. The Paterfamilias gestured at the poppies near where I was gardening and asked huffily "how much would you pay me to pull out those damn weeds?"

There are two sides to everything. Dazzling poppywort or damn weed. I lean to the first.

But most people love Argemone. Here's a picture I took this morning of another handsome clump

My garden is full of poppies--some already passed and some yet to come. The biggest impact is still the various horned poppies, one of my signature weeds

Glaucium x acutidentatum

My hybrid swarm varies from pure G. flavum to a nearly scarlet corniculatum. But these tricolor acutidentatum types are my favorites of the bunch.

Papaver anomalum

 I have always struggled to grow Papaver anomalum, and I accidentally found a spot it likes and comes back strongly and even self sows!

Papaver orientale ''Beauty of Livermere'

But the kicker for me will always be this blood red Oriental poppy...

And let's not even contemplate all the little alpine poppies, or Meconopsis (which I was so luck to see in abundance in Yunnan and Tibet a year ago! Don't get me started on THOSE!)

How much has transpired since then! Time is as evanescent and fragile as the flowers of poppies. Perhaps why we love them so much!