Top of the poppies

The most arresting poppy you can grow is the big, beautiful Oriental – and it doesn’t only come in red,

Unlike the field poppy, which grows anew from seed each year (seed incidentally that can remain dormant for generations in untilled ground, only to be triggered into growth by soil disturbance and light), Oriental poppies are herbaceous perennials, dying back in autumn but reappearing reliably each spring with renewed vigour. Around the end of May, the vast, bright red petals of the Oriental poppy ‘Beauty of Liver mere’ silkily unfurl, and throughout June they are the biggest, brightest, most sumptuous flowers in my garden.

There are three species of Oriental poppy, Papaver orientale, P. bracteatum and P. pseudoorientale. Although the difference between them is slight, they cross-breed to create 80 odd cultivars.

The Oriental poppy was first grown in Britain in the early 18th century by the Royal gardener George London, and for 200 years was available only in shades of orange or crimson. But over the past 100 years or so dozens of colours have been bred. If you like the earliness and upright qualities of ‘Beauty of Livermere’ but prefer it in pink, then ‘Big Jim’ has all these qualities and flowers that are a deep, almost magenta pink.

I tend to prefer some of the wonderfully intense and full-on oranges and reds. ‘Goliath’ is blood red and, as the name suggests, huge. ‘Curlilocks’ has very black blotches and petals that look as though they have been artfully shredded. ‘Wisley Beacon’ is a good orange, as is ‘Allegro’, although the latter is short and needs to be at the front of a border. ‘Karine’ is a genuine apricot, which is a rare colour for a flower.

Whatever their colour, all Oriental poppies thrive on the same growing regime. For a start they should always be supported to stop them falling over their neighbouring plants and reducing them to a soggy mush. The time to do this is as they start growing, before they need it, since a fallen plant, scooped up from the horizontal, never looks quite the same.

If you leave the flowering stem after the flower has finished, a seed pod forms which in due course will scatter its seed. However, it is better to remove it and all the leaves, cutting back to the base as soon as the flowering has finished. This will let in light, air and water, and encourage it to regrow to give you a second flowering later in the summer. It will also create room to plant a tender annual that will have enough time to get established before the poppy foliage begins to regrow.

Although the plants grow easily from seed, they are often muddy in colour. If you want to reproduce the same flower colours, the easiest way is to lift the plants in autumn, divide them and replant the pieces.

They also take easily from root cuttings. This is a slower method of getting new plants but more prolific. Lift a plant you like sometime in August or September and cut off sections of root about the thickness of a pencil into 5cm (2in) lengths. Stick these round the edge of a pot filled with a very gritty compost so that the tops are just below the surface, and put them in a cold frame or greenhouse. The following spring pot the rooted cuttings into individual pots and keep them in the pots all summer before planting them out in autumn, and they will flower the subsequent year.

Monty and his Oriental poppies ‘Beauty of Livermere’