Who’re You Callin’ Shirley?
I love shirley poppies. I had great success last year from seed and I have planted this variety by seed this year: Papaver rhoeas “mother of pearl”: in shades of grey, lilac, mauve and white.
This can be purchased from Select Seeds: http://www.selectseeds.com
Place the (very tiny) seeds in a mixtue of horticultural sand and sow in good, moist but well-drained soil. Place a light top dressing of soil on top of the seeds. Keep the bed evenly moist throughout the days of germination (about two weeks).
The Shirley poppy was created from 1880 onwards by the Reverend William Wilks, vicar of the parish of Shirley in England. In a corner of his garden where it adjoined arable fields, Wilks found a variant of the field poppy that had a narrow white border around the petals. By careful selection and hybridization over many years, he obtained a strain of poppies ranging in colour from white and pale lilac to pink and red, and unlike the wild poppies these had no dark blotches at the base of the petals.
Celia Thaxter writes in “An Island Garden”, 1894
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/thaxter/garden/garden.html:
“On one low bookcase are Shirley Poppies in a roseate cloud. And here let me say that the secret of keeping Poppies in the house two whole days without fading is this: they must be gathered early, before the dew has dried, in the morning. I go forth between five and six o’clock to cut them while yet their gray-green leaves are hoary with dew, taking a tall slender pitcher or bottle of water with me into the garden, and as I cut each stem dropping the flower at once into it, so that the stem is covered nearly its whole length with water; and so on till the pitcher is full. Gathered in this way, they have no opportunity to lose their freshness, indeed, the exquisite creatures hardly know they have been gathered at all.”
And for a succession of bloom:
“I am always planting Shirley Poppies somewhere! One never can have enough of them, and by putting them into the ground at intervals of a week, later and later, one can secure a succession of bloom and keep them for a much longer time, –keep indeed, their heavenly beauty to enjoy the livelong summer.”