Not too long ago, on a sunny day in April, my parents and I went to a nursery in Richmond called Annie's Annuals. It is an amazing nursery with all sorts of interesting plants. You could spend hours and hours there (and you know we did!) and there would still be plenty of plant species to see.
My parents are currently on a mission to xeriscape their front yard and were looking for plants that require little water to survive. We all fell in love with different flowers, grasses and succulents but nothing compared to...
The Papaver Hybridum!!! AKA the Orange Chiffon Poppy (sounds classy!). Now, this isn't a xeriscape friendly plant. It requires "average water" according to the peeps at Annie's but I could not resist that bright orange flower so I bought it just for funsies.
I took my little poppy home, bought it it's own little pot in a color that would compliment the orange flowers (interior designers: always about complimenting colors), and hoped it would grow.
The little guy grew fast! This picture was taken about two months after I bought it, but it seemed to double in size ever time I blinked (that may be an exaggeration, but you get what I'm saying).
There's that bright orange I fell in love with! The blooms only lasted about a day each and I got six flowers off of this plant - kind of disappointing, but it was still worth it.
After the petals fell off, we were left with this bulb-y pod (me scientific! :P). They were huge and I kept wanting to poke at them.
But I left them alone and sure enough, after a couple of weeks, the sides of the bulb turned down so that it could re-seed.
I want to have tons and tons (at least more than six) of Orange Chiffon poppies next year so my mom and I collected the seeds. We took the dried-out pods and shook the seeds out into a plastic baggie. I'll have to do more research on how to successfully re-plant these babies, or I maybe I'll leave it to my mom who is a wizard at gardening.
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