Expert: Long Island Gardener - 6/19/2006

Question
I have gorgeous pink poppies blooming now in my garden that reseed themselves and come back on their own every year. My question is: are they annuals (because they grow from seeds), or are they a perennial (because they come back every year)?  Thanks!

Answer
Gorgeous pink poppies - well, these could be 1 of 2 things.

Oriental Poppies (Papaver orientalis) have HUGE black centers and will stop traffic if people can see them from the street.  They are perennials.  You can grow an OP from seed but it blooms quicker if you buy it from Bluestone Perennials (www.bluestoneperennials.com) or another retailer.  This plant NEEDS a lot of drainage or it rots and never returns.  It blooms in spring for several weeks.  Then the foliage dies down like it was never there until the next year.  They have round, mounded, ferny leaves and take up a lot of space.

California or Iceland poppies (Eschscholzia hybrids and species)grow as annuals and sometimes as perennials and they are both beautiful but completely unrelated to Papavers.  Oddly enough, California State Polytechnic University researchers actually studied annual and perennial poppies growing at the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve (www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/poppy/pubs/popanper.html).

"It has also been apparent to botanists who have studied the plants that those of the Reserve grow as annuals, dying completely after seeds are shed, whereas those of the Fairmont site are perennial, resprouting each year from a persistent crown of stem tissue at soil level or slightly below," they wrote.  There ensues lots of technical discussion among botanists as to how to classify these, perennial or annual.  For our purposes this is probably neither here nor there.

These Eschscholzia are TOUGH plants that seem to be able to survive almost any kind of treatment.  They are highly drought-tolerant thanks to their California roots.  (Did I really say that?)

You can find seeds and striking photo/illustrations of all of the above at Rich Farm Garden (www.richfarmgarden.com/poppy.html) and Renee's Garden Seeds (www.reneesgarden.com/).  Just in case you are worried about getting these again next year.  Escholzia are sold as annuals but they do reseed if Venus and Mars are in alignment with Andromeda or whatever the formula is.  I don't have that here.  You, you lucky duck, apparently do.

The first year I bought my house, someone else's Iceland Poppy seeds planted themselves at my yard and were i.d.'d by a neighbor.  It was not there the next year.  But I am not home enough to keep seeds going.  Sad to say, despite the beauty of the brightly colored annual Iceland poppies, perennial Oriental Poppies are more my cup of tea.