I adore opium poppies, Papaver Somniferum. My first ever seeds originally came from a great country garden in Moree, South Muckie Buckie owned by Caroline Humphries. Every year I am totally bonkers in my obsessive pursuit to discover new, rare, and scarce seeds. My own personal holy grail are the seeds of the elusive and stunning double white flowering opium poppy.
Known as the poppy of sleep, yes, they can indeed make opium. However, it is completely beyond me how. Secretly, I must confess, I have tried, only for the whole process to be a complete failure.
But the same cannot be said of the annual visit of the dastardly night-time opium thieves, for they certainly do know how. In the dead of darkness when all is quiet and still, they cut and harvest the plump green pods. Thankfully they do leave some to self-seed, I suppose to guarantee another future crop for themselves in a year’s time. At first, I thought birds were the nasty culprits, but with no stoned avians happily relaxing and lying around flat on their backs, that theory was immediately thrown out.
The opium poppy can grow to a good 1.5 metres, the flowers can be as big as an outstretched hand, with petals like the most finely spun silk, so tissue thin they seem transparent. They come in a myriad of colours, hues and shades.
For me the leadup to their flowering creates this great fevered sense of expectation. For a good three months I have watched and tended both their growth in height and the swelling of their flowering pods, awaiting that magic day when all their treasured beauty will open and be finally revealed. Yes, you want to peel the pods open, just that little weenie bit, to divine a hint of their coming colouring, but that’s cheating, and with growing poppies impatience is not rewarded.
And then as in a miracle, the poppies flowering season finally begins. Every morning, with the rooster’s crow, heralding a fresh new day, I leap out of bed and gaily skip down to discover each successive newly emerged flower.
Will they be a pale shell pink or a vivid hot one, a magical magenta, a tantalising tangerine, a rich blood red, or even a combination of them all? Will the flower petals be a single, a double, even a peony shape. Or most fantastic of all, have the bees last year magically cross pollinated a particular poppy to create a new and original flower. One can only dream, and as everybody knows, dreams can indeed come true, if you try hard enough.
The cultivation of opium poppies is dead easy. The optimum time to sow seeds are from mid-autumn through to late winter, the earlier the better. The bed must provide good winter and spring sun. Combine and mix the seeds with a little bit of compost, potting-mix or sand, really whatever you have on hand, and cast it over bare soil. Hopefully the soil has already been prepped with composts, seaweed/fish tonics and fertilisers, for this will guarantee a bonza crop. If not, don’t despair, throw the seeds anyway for they will still perform well enough even with the poorest of soils.
Growing them in pots is generally not advisable because they possess a single long tap root which can be handicapped by the pot’s contained size. Myself, I have had poor results in growing them in pots and have given up the idea completely.
If at present you do not yet have any seeds of the opium poppy, beg, steal, or borrow. Try every method available to you, call in favours, even pleading down on your knees. Ask anyone or everyone, your garden friends, members of local garden clubs or even online for some freebies and begin to build up your own collections.
I am told the cultivation of opium poppies are illegal in Australia. However, unless you are growing them over a few hectares or every inch of your own garden, the police will never arrest you, and charge you with any major drug trafficking offences. There would have to be a massive national crackdown of the many thousands of suburban gardeners who grow them, all bundled instantly into newly overpopulated and overwhelmed jail and prison systems. And that ain’t never going to happen. Never ever.
For as we all know, we are only growing them to create a more beautiful world for all to share and enjoy, and the opium poppy seeds we harvest are strictly used only for culinary pursuits, that is, for the toppings of breads, biscuits or cakes.
So, stand up strong to such restrictive and antiquated laws. Be a little rebel, adopt an ethos of bloody buggering bullocks to big brother. Sow the opium poppy seeds of as many as you can, even if they are relegated to the back garden, hidden to others, but thankfully not to yourself, where their joy and stunning beauty can be fully appreciated each and every spring.
Please check out my other blogs of the Scarlet Red Flowering Flanders Poppy and the must have Californian Poppy.
Happy gardening and have fun,
Regards Ned McDowell.