Oriental Poppies. Waste of Space?


Is it just me, or are Oriental Poppies a tremendous waste of space in the
border?  Yes, they come in terrific colours, and the flowers are large, but
it seems that they have hardly opened and the petals start dropping.  While
mine don't seem to die back and disappear the way some books say they will
( maybe my summers aren't hot enough) I wish they would.  They are weedy
and thistle-like and quite unattractive after the flowering period, and
because you need to mass a lot of them to get any sort of flower display
they take up a lot of space.  I'm not short of space ( the main bed is
about 80 x 10 ft) but I am not sure I'm making good use of the poppy
section.  Mine have been in about 3 years, do I need to be more patient to
get them to flower more freely? More than one flower stalk per plant would
be nice.
I may replace them with some annual poppies, which are about the same size
and come in a variety of colours. Or I see Park's is offering seeds of P.
bracteatum, another perennial poppy, bright red and 4-5 ft tall.  Has
anyone grown this one?  Does it perform better than the P. orientalis?

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To sign-off this list, send email to majordomo@mallorn.com with the
message text UNSUBSCRIBE PERENNIALS
Other Mailing lists | Author Index | Date Index | Subject Index | Thread Index