The colour of a summer sky, with petals like crushed silk
It’s the mythical flower which has made Scotland the envy of the gardening world. Agnes Stevenson visits the best place to see the blue poppy in all its glory
For much of the year, the climate in Scotland is damp and chilly and even a stretch of lovely spring weather doesn’t make up for the fact that sunshine is seldom guaranteed.
But it is precisely because we have overcast skies and low temperatures that we can grow one particular plant, and that makes us the envy of most of the gardening world.
The blue poppy is a flower that’s wrapped in legend. It was only introduced to the West in the last century and in the decades before it arrived most of the reports of it that emerged from China were dismissed as myths.
Nobody could believe that a poppy the colour of a summer sky and with petals like crushed silk could actually exist but it does and has been found to grow better in Scotland than almost anywhere outside of the Himalayas.
The reason? Well, it’s all down to that cloud cover, frequent rainfall and acidic soil, which we have in abundance.
Himalayan blue poppies will start flowering later this month and one of the best places to see them is Branklyn Garden in Perth, where they grow in huge drifts around the fringes of the trees.
Branklyn is one of my favourite gardens and in it you can find most of the poppies that have been introduced from Bhutan and China as well as some of the best of those cultivars that have emerged since the plants were introduced into cultivation – in the wild the different kinds of blue poppy grow in farflung locations, so there was no chance of them hybridising naturally.
But Branklyn doesn’t just have blue poppies, the garden is full of gorgeous plants including lilies, rhododendrons and cassiopes – small shrubs native to the Arctic which, every May,
are covered in small, white bells. Branklyn celebrates its centenary this year, and now is a good time to visit because under the care of National Trust for Scotland property manager, Jim Jermyn, and a team of gardeners and volunteers, it is flourishing.
“The garden was begun by John and Dorothy Renton in the 1920s and they were friends with all the great plant hunters of the time, including George Forrest,” says Jermyn.
“As a result they received seed that was brought back from expeditions and they grew some incredible plants here.”
Today the two-acre garden has hardly changed since the Rentons’ era, apart from some small exceptions.
Jermyn adds:“the trees that the Rentons grew from seed are now mature specimens, so the garden is shadier than it was in their era.
“And we’ve had to reinforce the grass paths so that they can withstand the footfall of our thousands of visitors.”
Yet aside from these considerations, the garden is still what the Rentons created
– a treasure trove of incredible plants from some of the world’s most inaccessible places.
The challenge now for Jermyn and the team at Branklyn is how to keep all these plants in good health without the use of peat and he is currently trialling compost made from sheep’s wool and bracken to see if that works instead, with the aim of keeping Branklyn flourishing for another century.