Calender July 2015: Long-headed Poppy

July: Long-headed Poppy

Angel in Ancient Woods

(Papaver dubium, Order: Ranunculales, Family: Papaveraceae, Genus: Papaver )

When we moved to this house, I bought a packet of seed of 'wild meadow flowers'.  As a lazy naturalist, I chose having a wild flowers' garden.  Well, our garden isn't so big, though.  One day in July, a scarlet tissue-paper-like flower appeared in the sea (or a pond) of the green.

The poppy family has variety of species.  The victorian naturalist and illustrator, Cicely Mary Barker drew the poppy fairy in her Flower Fairies of the Summer (first published in 1925).  The flower she drew was common poppy, which had gorgeous red and black appearance.   The fairy has long black hair and wears read and black dress.   

 There are also rough poppy and prickly poppy.  Why all three have gorgeous appearance is, entirely of my view, because they have bigger black blotch base of petals.  The black in the middle of the scarlet petals makes a vivid impact.

Long-headed poppy, contrast to these three,  has no black blotch, and has light green stigma, which gives a mild natural impression.  The four petals are scarlet but slightly pinkish.

The name of 'long-headed' comes from its narrow, elongated capsule.  The capsule is hairless whereas the capsules of other ones are hairy.

In the book of The Bumper Book of Nature (by Stephen Moss, 2009, Square Peg) I found  a list, in which flowers of poppy should be first seen in each year around the 20th of July of the St Margaret Day.  (The author, Stephen Moss cited this from another book, Weather Lore by Richard Inwards, 1893.)  Maybe the saints' days are connected with the vegetation in Europe.

Carpets of the summer flowers are seen in our town at the marina throughout the summer.  There is an open public space where people can go for a walk and various flowers bloom throughout the summer.  I remember there used to be a just abandoned field with a lot of tubes, which I couldn't know what for.

I searched on the internet and found a newsletter by the Welsh Government through our county council website.  Now I know what those tubes on the field were.

The field used to be a landfill site.  The land has been owned by the Welsh Government since 2000.  They completed the project to improve gas and leachate management.  The tube I saw there were to be used to replace the wells and pipelines, which now underneath the wildflower meadows.  After completion of this work the wildflower meadows were created.

The meadows include a lot of popular common wildflowers, of course, poppies, cornflower, daisy, marigold, redshank etc.  They are beautiful, alas, cultivated, not entirely wild.