We are in peak Poppy season now with a lovely display of colour throughout the garden. Over the years I have selected only the single petaled variety, removing the doubles as they appear, I let the doubles flower, but remove the seed heads before they ripen.

There are hundreds of poppy varieties, but I really love the single intense red variety. Particularly the one with the black centre. I’m not so keen on the white centred variety of the same flower, so I have slowly removed that one as well. I just love the contrast of the black with the bright red.

These wild flowers just suit themselves where they grow, but they love to come up where the soil has been disturbed, ie, dug over, just like in a garden bed. They will come up in the orchard and sometimes in the lawn too, but all the wild life around here love them just as much as I do and they get eaten off pretty quickly. I doubt that there is any opium in the young leaves of the seedlings, but the locals seem to love them. The don’t stand a chance if they are not fenced. They must seem like junk food or cake to a kangaroo. They seek them out and selectively nibble them down to the ground.

I have selected a few slightly different shades of red over time, from pale orange red to dark claret crimson, but I love the fire engine red the most.

Some yers back I scattered a few poppy seeds around, down in the vineyard among the rows of cabinet sauvignon. I had this romantic idea of there being rows of grapes and an understory of crimson red flowers. Something like you might see in an impressionist painting. Well that was a very nice idyl on my part. Dream on Walter!.

They grew quite well in there as it was a fenced off area to keep all the locals out. The rabbits, wallabies, kangaroos, and wombats. They all like to graze on tender grape vine shoots and tendrils. The fence worked, but there was some thing that I hadn’t counted on. Wood ducks! The wild wood ducks figured out that they could fly in, swooping down low and land length wise in-between the rows of vines, just like a landing strip. They spent the day in there. Grazing on the poppies in the morning, and then lay about chatting amongst them selves for the rest of the day. After that first year, and my cunning plan was discovered by the ducks. I never got another poppy from the vineyard. Such is life!

These days the local wildlife cleans up any attempt to grow poppies out in the open areas of lawn. Poppies only thrive inside the protective surrounds of the aesthetic environment of the garden with its totally netted protective cover. A bit like artists in the larger society!

I enjoy my little hobby of supporting and protecting this delicate and vulnerable species. It’s a bit like being a patron of the arts. We have so many poppy flowers at the moment that Janine picks a few each day and puts them in a vase in the kitchen and bathroom. The only survive for a day and start dropping petals by the evening. They are looking pretty drowsy by the next day and comatose in the evening. Luckily we have a lot of them just now and we can afford to replace them each alternative day.

My own little memento mori! Life is short and can be brutal. Enjoy the beauty while you can.