On Victoria Day weekend, with almost two warm weeks having elapsed since my first May wildflower foray into the woods flanking the dirt road near our cottage on Lake Muskoka, near Torrance, Ontario I was curious to see what else had come into bloom. This time, knowing the blackflies and mosquitoes would be active, I came prepared with a Coghlan’s head net for my hat. What a lifesaver that was!
As I left our place on the Page’s Point peninsula, I noticed the sand cherry in flower down by the shore. Prunus pumila is a plant not only of sandy shores along the Great Lakes, but of smaller lakes, too. It also emerges from soil in granite outcrops, like Lake Muskoka.
Spring bees love the sand cherry flowers. This is an andrena mining bee.
Lowbush blueberries (Vaccinium angustifolium) were in flower, too. Fingers crossed for sufficient rain to produce fruit.
I also noticed the rather subtle flowers of limber honeysuckle (Lonicera dioica), another Muskoka native.
Further down the path was a little stand of gaywings, aka fringed milkwort (Polygala paucifolia).
Back on the dirt road, hepatica, spring beauty and dogtooth violet were all finished, but I found some sweet little downy yellow violets (V. pubescens) in the grassy centre of a neighbour’s driveway.
Wild sarsaparilla (Aralia nudicaulis) was now in full bloom.
False Solomon’s seal (Maianthemum racemosum) was just about to flower…..
…. .and across the road, little starflower was becoming used to its new name, Lysimachia borealis (formerly Trientalis).
I stepped down into the wetland on either side of the road to get a better look at the violet that my Field Botanists of Ontario Facebook page had identified for me in my last blog. You can see it in the mud under the emerging royal ferns (Osmunda regalis var. spectabilis). It’s called Macloskey’s violet or small white violet (Viola macloskeyi) and is native to much of northeast N. America. This is when I really appreciated my bug veil!
Here’s a close-up look at the violet.
In the wetland on the opposite side of the road, cinnamon ferns (Osmundastrum cinnamomeum) had mostly unfurled since my last visit.
There were masses of Macloskey’s violets here too, but what was that white flower at the edge of the swale?
It was wild calla or water arum (Calla palustris) – my first time seeing this lovely marginal aquatic plant.
Wild calla bears the spathe-and-spadix floral arrangement typical of the Arum family (Araceae). According to the Illinois Wildflowers site: “The spadix has mostly perfect (bisexual) flowers… These small flowers are densely arranged across the entire surface of the spadix and they are numerous. Each perfect flower has a green ovoid pistil that is surrounded at its base by 6-9 white stamens”. Flies are its principal pollinators. After flowering ends, the spathe and spadix both turn green. As fruit develops, it turns bright-red.
I actually made a little video of my foray into the wet areas and you can hear the mosquitoes in the blue violet segment, as well as the lovely Muskoka birds. It ends with the chokecherries (Prunus virginiana) further up the dirt road.
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The chokecherries had just been in bud two weeks earlier, but were now in full flower….
….. and hosting native bees as well as this little beetle.
In the woods, beaked hazel (Corylus cornuta) had leafed out.
Eastern columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) grew here and there on shallow soil atop rock outcrops.
I saw exactly one rock harlequin (Capnoides sempervirens) but it was difficult to capture with my cellphone so I’ve added a camera closeup from a previous spring behind our own cottage.
And of course loads of wild strawberry (Fragaria virginiana).
The forest floor under this sugar maple seedling (Acer saccharum) was thickly carpeted with the leaves of countless species still awaiting their time to shine – or perhaps never rising at all, but merely part of the great fabric of nature here.
There were also seedling oaks, both red oak (Quercus rubra) and white oak (Quercus alba). The latter, in this neck of the woods, never seems to get bigger than a small scrubby tree.
Those oak photos were the last ones I made for 30 minutes because I got turned around and lost in the woods. It was only for a half-hour, but it felt like hours. I climbed over and under downed trees and came to hemlock stands and fairly high cliffs, beyond which lay… more forest. Since it was mid-afternoon, I followed the sun, thinking I needed to go south – but I was in fact walking more west than south. Nothing looked familiar – I was really lost, and getting thirsty in the heat! Feeling a growing sense of panic, I called my husband Doug back at the cottage. “You need to veer left as you’re looking at the sun to find the dirt road,” he said. Within 10 minutes I started to recognize some of the plants I’d seen earlier and then I heard the voices of children and saw the roof of a truck heading down the dirt road. Whew! Next time I won’t wander without taking water and leaving a trail of cookie crumbs! (Note to self: also get compass and GPS apps on phone.) The arrows below with our cottage marked in red approximate my wanderings.
When I got back to the dirt road, I found the first instar of the gypsy moth caterpillars that will ravage our Muskoka oak and pine trees this summer. Very tiny, it was crawling up the leaf of striped maple or moose maple (Acer pensylvancum) which was also sporting its pendant green flowers. Some of my readers will recall my 2020 blog A Gypsy Moth Summer on Lake Muskoka in which I described how I used a homemade oil spray to kill the egg masses.
Heading back to the cottage, I found maple-leaf viburnum (V. acerifolium) in bud…..
….. and a few trilliums that had not yet withered in the unseasonal May heat. And I had learned a few valuable lessons about going into the Muskoka bush alone!
What a beautiful weekend I enjoyed recently. Not only was it Mother’s Day and I had my first-born, ‘two-days-before-Mother’s Day’ son nearby, but we enjoyed a walk up the dirt road behind neighbouring cottages on Lake Muskoka near Torrance, a few hours north of Toronto, and found a treasure trove of native spring wildflowers on both the lake side and the crown land side. The photo below is of the road from another May. This year, the sustained, cool weather meant leaves were just breaking on the trees and best of all the blackflies had not yet emerged!
Ecologically, the address of the dirt road near Bala marked with the red arrow, below, is (broadest to narrowest classification) Ontario Shield Ecozone, Georgian Bay Ecoregion 5E, Huntsville Ecodistrict 5E8. According to the provincial classification: “The Huntsville Ecodistrict is an undulating to rolling landscape underlain by Precambrian bedrock. The terrain, particularly in the west, has been heavily influenced by glacial Lake Algonquin that inundated the area about 11,000 years ago. As the land emerged from underneath the ice, morainal material was deposited. The area was then submerged under the glacial lake, which removed or reworked much of the material through wave action and fluctuating lake levels. The western portion of the ecodistrict is characterized by a mosaic of bedrock ridges with a discontinuous, shallow layer of morainal material, bare bedrock, and pockets of deeper glaciolacustrine sediment.” Most of our district is covered by deciduous and mixed forest, including northern red oak, red maple (sugar maples predominate in the east part of the ecodistrict), yellow birch, paper birch, American beech, basswood, eastern hophornbeam, eastern hemlock and eastern white pine.
Though we’ve had our cottage for two decades, it was precisely the right moment to enjoy a bounty of spring wildflowers I’d never seen flowering all together, most of them dependent on the dappled light under deciduous trees before the leaves emerge to cast heavier shade. Plants like round-lobed hepatica, Anemone americana, both the white and purple forms.
Many gardeners think they need to do a clean-up in autumn or spring, removing every leaf to expose bare soil; indeed, I heard a leaf-blower droning away on a cottage property nearby. But nature is under no such misapprehension; the spring understory here on Lake Muskoka is thick with successive years of red oak and beech leaves, all contributing to the health of the soil and the richness of the forest. Hepatica has no trouble emerging through them, pushing fresh new leaves and fuzzy flower stems up through last year’s bronzed foliage which then withers away.
Like many plants, DNA sequencing has resulted in hepaticas undergoing a scientific name change. They’re now placed in the Anemone genus.
Carolina springbeauty (Claytonia caroliniana) was showing its mauve-striped face here and there too, the flowers so tiny they’re easy to overlook. It grows from a corm and is one of our spring ephemerals, plants that disappear and become dormant by summer.
I was struck by the proximity of the spring beauty and the decomposing stump bedecked by turkey tail fungus (Trametes versicolor)…..
….and another fungi-rich stump flanked by masses of red maple seedlings (Acer rubrum). The coming and the going, the cycle of decomposition and renewal in this mixed forest.
Birches (Betula spp.) are not long-lived compared to other deciduous trees, usually around 50-70 years in our northern climate. Sometimes decomposition begins when they’re still standing, like this trunk with tinder fungus (Fomes fomentarius) all the way up. It’s called tinder fungus because it can be used to make a fire; in fact the Tyrolean Ice Man Ötzi, whose 5000-year-old corpse was revealed by melting glaciers near Bolzano, Italy in 1991, had a piece on a cord around his neck.
When birches fall, it takes little time before moss spores find them and begin to spread their green tentacles. Before long, the birch becomes part of the forest floor.
Though rare, a lightning strike can also kill a birch. This one would have made a loud crack in one of our summer thunderstorms.
I found this juxtaposition poignant: a young American beech sapling (Fagus grandifolia) growing against the decaying trunk of a beech killed by beech-bark disease, a terrible insect-fungus plague taking a toll on our central Ontario forests, especially those where beeches grow with hemlocks. The vector is a beech-scale insect (Cryptococcus fagisuga) which, like many killers of our native species (e.g. Dutch elm disease) is an invasive from Europe. It admits a canker fungus called Neonectria faginata.
Groundcedar or fan club-moss, Diphastriastum digitatum is a lycopod, a throwback to the Carboniferous era (360-300 million years ago) when spore-forming plants like these formed forests of giant trees. Their decomposition and burial over millions of years gave the world its coal deposits.
In low-lying areas, we found another spring ephemeral: dogtooth violet or trout lily Erythronium americanum which is not a violet but is a member of the lily family, Liliaceae. The “trout” part is because the mottled leaves resemble brook trout.
Although it looks like the flower has six yellow petals, in fact the reverse view shows the three brownish sepals.
The ecology of dogtooth violet is fascinating. In some parts of these woods, it made up almost the entire ground layer, but only a few plants bore flowers, the rest just had leaves. In fact, Erythronium americanum takes 4-7 years to flower, and researchers have calculated that in any given population only 0.5% will bear flowers.
There’s a little wetland along the road that drains the forest from the west. It’s where spring peepers sing in April and mosquitoes gather when the weather warms.
I went down onto the boggy mosses to get closer to the hummocks of cinnamon fern (Osmundastrum cinnamomeum) which had just emerged….
….. with their croziers wrapped in gauzy hairs. Cinnamon and royal fern (Osmunda regalis) are the principal wetland ferns here.
In springtime and after heavy summer rains, ground water moves through this wetland, passes under the dirt road in a culvert and wends its way as a creek through our friends’ property before splashing down into Lake Muskoka as a small waterfall. I made the video below to show it.
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We found coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara) in flower at the edge of the road.
Native to Europe, Asia and North Africa, coltsfoot was used as a medicinal by early settlers – its name comes from the Latin “tussis” for cough and “ago”, meaning to act upon – and seed has made its way to throughout the region.
Ferns unfurled their croziers from the moss in the low spots.
We noticed that several of the hemlocks and pines along the road had an orange-red flush to their bark, but only on the side exposed to the light. Some research revealed that this is a fairly recent condition called Red Bark Phenomenon or RBP, having been discovered and named about 10 years ago in New England. It is caused by a filamentous green algae (Chlorophyta) tentatively identified as Trentophilia whose cytoplasm contains an orange-red pigment.
Patrick leaned into a little thicket of chokecherry (Prunus virginiana)….
….. not quite in flower. He detected a minty-basil fragrance, though the twigs are occasionally described as having an ‘almond’ aroma.
It was at this point that we left the road and walked towards a rocky outcrop about 30 feet away. Maintaining the overhead hydro line here requires tree and brush cutting that provides a little more light than normal……
……and this area was rich with loads of spring ephemeral Dutchman’s breeches (Dicentra cucullaria)….
…. and the occasional common blue violet (Viola sororia).
I loved this exposed bit of rock, typical of the metamorphic banded gneiss on this part of the Canadian Shield, a remnant of the Grenville Orogeny and more than a billion years old. (If you want a lot more amateur geology, have a peek at my recent blog memoir, ‘My Jaded Past, My Rocky Present’).
I spotted an unfamiliar shrub on the lake side of the road and wandered in to check it out. It was American fly honeysuckle (Lonicera canadensis) with its paired, pendant, pale-yellow flowers.
The shrubs grew on top of the outcrop nearby – not showy, but an integral part of the ecosystem.
Finally, as we got close to the back of the East Bay Landing property, there were trilliums (T. grandiflorum). Not the vast colonies we would see on rises along Highway 38 and 400 later, just a few here and there with lots more getting set to bloom.
It was the perfect way to end our walk into the May woods on Lake Muskoka.
Exactly 10 years ago today, I had one of my best spring garden visits anywhere. Except it just happened to be right here in Toronto at one of our biggest ‘tourist attractions’, Casa Loma. But back on May 12, 2011, I didn’t bother staying inside the castle (which I had toured many times) and instead went right out to the garden. I passed by the Asian-themed garden with its pretty azaleas…..
….. and walked down the slope past the bright-magenta Rhododendron dauricum. For geology fans, this hillside is actually the ancient shoreline of Lake Ontario’s Ice Age predecessor, Lake Iroquois.
I slowed down completely as I came to the staircase near the bottom, where native Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica) were at their very peak.
Virginia bluebells might be one of the northeast’s most splendid springtime sights! Like many of our native spring wildflowers, they’re ‘ephemeral’, meaning after they flower and set seed, they just die back completely… until next spring.
I had a destination in mind, and it was the Woodland Garden with its beautiful paper birches and a spectacular underplanting of some of the best spring natives, as well as a few delicate Asian groundcovers that added their own charms. Here we have Virginia bluebells with lots of lovely ostrich ferns (Matteucia struthiopteris).
An ascending path made from grit and flagstone slabs takes you back up the Iroquois shoreline so you can enjoy all the shade-lovers. Here we have the three principal actors: Virginia bluebell (M. virginica), yellow wood poppy (Stylophorum diphyllum) and ostrich ferns. (Note how much bigger the wood poppy’s flowers are than that confusing, weedy, invasive doppelgänger with the small yellow flowers, greater celandine, Chelidonium majus.)
I love yellow-with-blue in the garden, and this is one of the finest duos!
Ontario’s provincial floral emblem, shimmering-white, showy trilliums (T. grandiflorum) add to the display.
Virginia bluebells are also lovely with yellow merrybells (Uvularia grandiflora).
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I’ve never identified the buckeye seedlings that were popping up in this planting, but given it’s mostly native, perhaps Ohio buckeye (Aesculus glabra)?
There were also epimediums in this garden, like the red-flowered E. x rubrum you can see at the bottom left, below,
… and here, with Virginia bluebells.
Yellow-flowered Epimedium x versicolor ‘Sulphureum’ was featured in the woodland as well……
…. and orange-flowered Epimedium x warleyense ‘Orange Queen’.
Finally, a pure-white trillium with E. x versicolor ‘Sulphureum’.
Whoever said it was terrible to garden in shade?
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If you want to read more about spring designs for shade, have a look at my blog on the Montreal Botanical Garden’s fabulous Jardin d’Ombre, A Shade Garden Master Class.
I’m not sure that all my readers know that my main bit of low-paying work for the past several decades has been ‘stock photography’ of plants, gardens and pollinators. In short, wherever I am – in public or private gardens – I like to photograph plants and label them later with their correct botanical names. Then… maybe… there’s a .00001% chance that some publisher or editor will be looking for JUST what I have and pay me a huge sum to licence it for their book or magazine. (Haha). There aren’t many people in North America doing exactly what I’ve been doing and those who do would tell you that this is not the best way to support yourself in life.
But back to the botanical names. One of my favourite plant families is the Poppy Family, i.e. Papaveraceae. Though most of us know what a “poppy” is with its silky petals, the family is actually very large and diverse with 760 species in 44 genera featuring annuals, perennials, shrubs and small tropical trees. Taxonomists have worked to help us understand how their genealogy fits together, placing the genera into subfamilies, tribes and sub-tribes. DNA sequencing has resulted in many favourites, like bleeding heart, being shuffled from one genus into a new one.
I have been fortunate over the past three decades to photograph many of these plants, including Chinese native noble-flowered birthwort, Corydalis nobilis, below, arching over North American native yellow wood poppy, Stylophorum diphyllum, seen in mid-May in the Shade Garden at Montreal Botanical Garden. I wrote a blog about this fabulous garden.
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FUMARIOIDIAE
Let’s start with the subfamily Fumarioidiae, tribe Fumariae, subtribe Corydalinae. They used to have their own family, Fumariaceae, but they have now been ‘lumped’ by the APG (Angiosperm Phylogeny Group) into Papaveraceae. With their bilaterally symmetrical or zygmomorphic flowers, they don’t look much like poppies, do they? But that’s the thing about DNA. You can have cousins that don’t look anything like you; nevertheless if you go back far enough in the family tree, you share great-great-great-grandparents. To set the mood, below is a little scented nosegay of Corydalis solida, a bulb native to moist, shady woodlands in Europe and Asia. It grows like a bandit beside my garden path and also throughout my ‘lawn’, but it dies down quickly like most spring bulbs.
Capnoides sempervirens or pink corydalis, grows seemingly out of the ancient banded gneiss rock at our cottage on Lake Muskoka, north of Toronto, which is how it got its other common name, rock harlequin.
Corydalis species….. where to start? Let’s go alphabetically with the beautiful Corydalis flexuosa below. I photographed it in the Himalayan garden at Vancouver’s VanDusen Botanical Garden. In 2020, I wrote a 2-part blog about this fabulous garden in springtime.
Then there is Siberian corydalis or noble-flowered birthwort, Corydalis nobilis. Like many Papaveraceae, it is a spring ephemeral, enjoying moist rich soil in dappled shade, then retreating after its flowers wither.
Corydalis quantmeyerana hails from Sichuan. This cultivar is called ‘Chocolate Stars’ but I couldn’t see much brown colouring in the foliage of the plant, which I photographed at VanDusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver.
In my Toronto side-yard in early spring, the borders beside the path are filled with the bulb Corydalis solida, both the lilac-purple species itself and the pink-flowered cultivar ‘Beth Evans’. They thrive under my tall black walnut (Juglans nigra) – and have also popped up throughout my lawn. I welcome them all for their short stay, before they die down in late spring.
The Dicentra genus (formerly bleeding heart) is now comprised of only North American species. Dicentra canadensis or squirrel corn likes humus-rich soil in shady rock outcrops in deciduous forests of northeast N. America.
I found Dutchman’s breeches, Dicentra cucullaria one April in the native plant woodland at Toronto’s Casa Loma. Both Dutchman’s breeches and squirrel corn are spring ephemerals, dying down soon after blooming.
Dicentra eximia or fringed bleeding heart is native to northeastern N. America from the Appalachian mountains northward. This is the cultivar ‘Luxuriant’.
I photographed the western counterpart, Pacific bleeding heart, Dicentra formosa with sword ferns in the native plants garden at Darts Hill Garden Park outside Vancouver.
Many gardeners still mourn the taxonomic journey of bleeding heart out of the Dicentra genus to the awkwardly-named and monotypic genus Lamprocapnos as L. spectabilis.
I spent many hours at Toronto’s Spadina House gardens, where white bleeding heart, L. spectabilis ‘Alba’, looks lovely in spring with forget-me-nots. (See more of Spadina House at my blog exploring the colour ‘purple’.)
One of the stars of the renowned black-and-gold border at VanDusen Botanical Garden is the chartreuse bleeding heart L. spectabilis ‘Gold Heart’, seen here with Tulipa ‘Queen of Night’.
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Now let’s look at sub-tribe Fumariinae.
Common fumitory or earth smoke,Fumaria officinalis,is considered a weed in many quarters, but it’s rather sweet, especially mixed in with a chartreuse-leaved cranesbill like ‘Ann Folkard’.
Rock fumewort or yellow corydalis used to be… well… a corydalis, C. lutea, but it’s now Pseudofumaria lutea. Native to the European Alps, it is one of those easy-to-grow, graceful plants that looks lovely in light shade. And its name was changed, of course, because of DNA analysis. I learned the word “vicariance” in reading the abstract, meaning “fragmentation of the environment (as by splitting of a tectonic plate) in contrast to dispersal as a factor in promoting biological evolution by division of large populations into isolated subpopulations”.
‘Rock fumewort’, of course, describes the alpine setting to which P. lutea is native, a trait beautifully exploited at Chanticleer Garden in Wayne, PA outside Philadelphia. In June, the gardener here mixes it with scrambling yellow sedums, mountain bluets, various alpine campanulas and the odd perennial geranium. And yes, I wrote a 2-part blog about Chanticleer.
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PAPAVEROIDIAE
There are three tribes in this sub-family, all with radially symmetrical or actinopmorphic flowers. We begin with the Eschscholzieae, and its 3 genera, all from western N. America.
First comes Dendromecon. When I photographed the Channel Island tree poppy near ceanothus at Seaside Gardens in Carpinteria, California (my blog on that lovely garden is here), it was labelled Dendromecon harfordii, below. Three days later at the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden, I found a taller plant labelled as D. rigida ssp. harfordii. Take your pick.
There are 17 species of Eschscholzia, but California poppies (Eschscholzia californica) are the quintessential floral emblem of the Golden State. One of the great joys of visiting California in spring is seeing them along the road, as in Napa…
…. or with blue ceanothus in an iconic native partnership at the University of California Berkeley Botanic Garden….
…. and with other California natives like western blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium bellum) at Santa Barbara Botanic Garden. (By the way, I wrote a blog about the meadow at SBBG.)
The final cousin in the Eschscholzieae tribe is the the monotypic genus Hunnemannia, with its sole species, Mexican tulip poppy, Hunnemannia fumariifolia. I found it at Seaside Gardens in Carpinteria, a wonderful nursery and display garden which I featured in a 2014 blog.
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The second tribe in Papaveroidiae is the Chelidoniae.
We begin with that trickster Chelidonium majus, the greater celandine. Why do I say that? Because in eastern N. America, this Eurasian species is often mistaken for our native yellow wood poppy, next. But when it blooms the difference is apparent for Chelidonium has much smaller flowers, as you see below. This is my garden, where it likes to hide in my ostrich ferns (Matteucia struthiopteris), that fern proof positive that native species can be every bit as aggressive as exotics.
I took yellow wood poppy, Stylophorum diphyllum, out of alphabetical order to compare it with Chelidonium, above. A denizen of shady, rich, deciduous woodland in northeast North America, it doesn’t have the invasive tendencies of its doppelgänger cousin. I love seeing it in May in the woodland planting at Toronto’s Casa Loma, with Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica) and ostrich ferns, below.
Horned poppies (Glaucium spp.) are next in this tribe, perennial plants of the rocky steppe regions of the world. In fact I found the biennial or short-lived perennial red horned poppy Glaucium corniculatum in the Central Asian Steppe Garden at Denver Botanic Garden a few years ago. I wrote a blog about this interesting new garden at DBG.
And the Alpine Garden at Montreal Botanical Garden is where I found an Eastern bumble bee gathering pollen in yellow horned poppy Glaucium flavum. It’s a short-lived perennial or biennial from Europe, N. Africa and elsewhere. I also wrote a blog about this garden, in honour of its former curator René Giguère.
Hylomecon japonica, Japanese woodland poppy, is a rarity. I found it in the Shade Garden at the Montreal Botanical Garden on May 21, 2014.
Macleaya cordata or plume poppy (syn. Bocconia) is a bit of an oddball as the Papavaeraceae go. Native to China, Japan and Taiwan, it is taller at 5-8 ft (1.5-2.4 m) than most of its kin with airy panicles of tiny flowers in mid-late summer. It is recommended for the back of the border but, caveat emptor, it spreads very aggressively via rhizomes.
Our native northeastern bloodroot, Sanguinaria canadensis, is a favourite early spring wildflower, its shimmering white flower emerging through a protective leaf which unfurls once the flower opens. It is seen below with Siberian squill (Scilla siberica) and a skeletonized autumn leaf.
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Skipping over the small Tribe Platystemonae from the Western United States (since I haven’t photographed any), we come to Tribe Papavereae with its more familiar “poppy” flowers with the ring of pollen-rich anthers and prominent ovary. Typical of the reproductive arrangement is Iceland poppy, Papaver nudicaule, below.
Moving alphabetically through Papaverae, we start with Argemone, or prickly poppies. I loved this casual design by Denver Botanic Garden’s plant curator Dan Johnson for his home garden’s ‘hellstrip’ bordering the road in Englewood, Colorado. (I wrote a blog about this colourful plantsman’s garden.) I believe it is native, white-flowered crested prickly poppy, Argemone polyanthemos with California poppies (Eschscholzia californica) for a Papaveraceae double-date.
Way back in 1998 in my Fujichrome slide days, I photographed purple prickly poppy Argemone sanguinea. Not the best image but you get the picture.
If there is a plant genus that deserves the moniker “Holy Grail”, it is Meconopsis, especially the species called “Himalayan Blue Poppy”, Meconopsis baileyi(syn. M. betonicifolia), below. Discovered originally in mountainous Yunnan, China in the 1880s by the French missionary Jean Marie Delavay, it was English botanist and plant collector Frank Kingdon-Ward who brought out seeds and contributed to its great popularity with his 1913 book In the Land of Blue Poppies. Though exceptionally hardy, alas the blue poppy is not for everyone. It has very specific cultivation needs, preferring humus-rich, consistently moist, neutral to slightly acidic soil in a dappled-shade, woodland setting in a region with cool, damp summers. Thus it likes coastal British Columbia, Washington State, Alaska and cooler maritime settings on the East Coast. Plants tend to flower for one or two seasons before dying, but will seed around if conditions are good.
I have photographed blue poppies (usually in the rain) at Vancouver’s VanDusen Botanical Garden where they grow in the Himalayan Dell beneath towering giant Himalayan lily, Cardiocrinum giganteum. I made this photo May 27, 2013.
They also greet visitors along the main path in the David Lam Asian Garden at UBC Botanical Garden, where I photographed them on May 29, 2013…..
…. and in the lovely Japanese garden at Victoria’s Butchart Gardens when I was there on May 30, 2011.
VanDusen’s collection of Meconopsis species is particularly good. If you go in late May, you might find the lovely pink form of M. baileyi….
…. and the cultivar M. baileyi ‘Hensol Violet’….
The prickly blue poppy,Meconopsis horridula grows at VanDusen in the Himalayan Dell, too. Like many Meconopsis species, it is monocarpic, producing flowers just once before dying.
The satin poppy, Meconopsis napaulensis might be flowering in white or pale pink.
The Himalayan woodland poppy formerly included in Meconopsis has now been moved and is called Cathcartia villosa. I photographed the one below at VanDusen on June 23, 2010 in a particularly cool spring where flowering was late.
Finally, we come to the poppies, the genus Papaver. I’ll begin alphabetically with another species that has been shuffled out of its previous home in Meconopsis, Welsh poppy. Formerly called M. cambrica, it is now Papaver cambricum. This species grows throughout VanDusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver, both the yellow form, here with bluebells…
….. and the orange form.
Another recent arrival in the genus is annual wind poppy, Papaver heterophyllum, formerly Stylomecon heterophylla. Native to the coastal mountains from northern California south to Baja California, Mexico, germination of its seed is triggered by wildfires.
The Caucasian scarlet poppy (Papaver commutatum) is an annual native to Turkey, Iran and the Caucasus. The cultivar ‘Ladybird’, below, has particularly vibrant red flowers with prominent black blotches.
Iceland poppy or Papaver nudicauleis a short-lived perennial native to a wide range of boreal regions in Europe and North America. In California, it’s often used for spring bedding; I photographed the plants below at Hearst Castle in San Simeon on March 29, 2014.
For beginning gardeners, Oriental poppy, Papaver orientale, below, is often one of the first perennials to try. Native to Turkey, Iran and the Caucasus, its silken petals and dark stamens add drama to the late spring-early summer garden.
The flattened stigmas of Oriental poppy extend like tentacles across the top of the carpel. This is the black-blotched, white cultivar ‘Royal Wedding’.
Oriental poppies are part of the rich roster of late spring-early summer perennials, such as Siberian iris (I. sibirica), below. Also flowering at that time are peonies, foxgloves, Shasta daisies, yarrow, roses and a host of other possible companions.
Hybridizers have created numerous cultivars of Oriental poppy with white, red, salmon and peach flowers. There is even a double variety called P. orientale var. plena ‘Red Shades’, below.
If you followed my Covid-winter #janetsdailypollinator posts on my Social Media accounts (you can see all 144 on Facebook or Instagram by inserting that hashtag), you might recall me including one of a honey bee dusted with the black pollen of Oriental poppy, below. Though poppies do not produce nectar, many are sources of abundant pollen for bees.
When we participated in an Adventure Canada cruise of the Eastern Arctic, my favourite activity was to scramble around the tundra photographing the plants of Nunavut and Greenland. I found the Arctic poppy, Papaver radicatum, below, at Sylvia Grinnell Park in Iqaluit. I wrote a 10-blog series on that fabulous voyage last year, beginning with Iqaluit.
In Flanders fields the poppies blowBetween the crosses, row on rowThat mark our place.
Canadian army physician Lt.-Col. John McRae’s famous Second World War poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ brings us to European corn poppies, Papaver rhoeas. It was spring in Belgium in 1915 when McRae watched his best friend die in the muddy fields of Ypres, where red poppies with black centres had begun to flower. As the Canada Veterans page says: “The day before he wrote his famous poem, one of McCrae’s closest friends was killed in the fighting and buried in a makeshift grave with a simple wooden cross. Wild poppies were already beginning to bloom between the crosses marking the many graves. Unable to help his friend or any of the others who had died, John McCrae gave them a voice through his poem.”
Corn poppies are used in the gravel garden at Chanticleer near Philadelphia, along with white lace flower (Orlaya grandiflora).
It was the Rev. William Wilkes (1843-1923) in the hamlet of Shirley, south of London, who noticed the first unusual variant in a field of wild red corn poppies, a flower with a white edge. That was the beginning of 20 years of his hybridization work to get the characteristics he wanted with petals ranging from white through palest pink, lilac, cherry pink, apricot, salmon, scarlet, orange and bicolours as well as semi-doubles. They became known as the “Shirley poppies”. This is a montage I made of various strains and colours of P. rhoeas.
I love seeing the little Spanish poppy, Papaver rupifragum var. atlanticum ‘Flore Pleno’ in my travels. Also called Moroccan poppy or double Atlas poppy, there is usually a bee rolling around in the pollen-rich stamens. Despite its Mediterranean origins, it’s quite hardy and easily grown from seed.
Finally we come to the ‘type species’ for Papaver, the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum. That common name, of course, refers to the latex derived from certain botanical varieties of opium poppy being grown – either legally by the pharmaceutical industry, or illegally by the illicit drug trade – for naturally-occurring alkaloids such as morphine and codeine, among others. These are the “opiates” whose sedative and painkilling effects can also be highly addictive. “Somniferum”, the Latin epithet for the species means “sleep-inducing”. But most of the 52 botanical varieties of P. somniferum do not produce opiates. Czech blue poppy, though the same species name, is farmed for bread-seed, the little black poppy seeds you find on bagels and cakes. And many varieties were simply bred for ornamental purposes, not for medicinal or illicit drug manufacture. But if you want a history of the Opium Wars, etc., check out the Wiki page.
One beautiful cultivar of P. somniferum is ‘Lauren’s Grape’, below, my photo showing the glaucous, lettuce-like foliage of opium poppy. I photographed this lovely specimen in the Niwot, Colorado garden of Mary and Larry Scripter, which was designed by Lauren herself, Lauren Springer.
‘Cherry Glow’ is another beautiful opium poppy cultivar. I found a little Toxomerusgeminatus hoverfly foraging on the pollen-rich stamens.
Sometimes you’ll see seeds offered for “peony-flowered” opium poppies, P. somniferum var. paeoniflorum. The cultivar below is ‘Flemish Antique’ and is quite famous in poppy circles.
And then there is P. somniferum var. laciniatum with its shaggy petals. I photographed the pretty duo below in my son-in-law’s mom’s farm garden in Alberta.
And now, finally, I come to the end of my long, long look at the diverse Poppy Family. With its silky white petals and bright yellow stamens, Romneya coulteri, Coulter’s matilija poppy or California tree poppy, is the tallest poppy family species I’ve photographed, growing up to 8 ft (2.4 m) tall and wide. Though I have seen this species in California, I photographed this one in the public garden in the Queenstown Gardens Park in New Zealand.
