Some of the garden’s most striking scenes are the result of selective weeding of volunteers, plants that show up each year with little effort on the gardener’s part. Such self-sowing annuals and biennials will become permanent residents of your garden, but only if you get them started by scattering their seed. Examples include Shirley poppies, pansies (Viola sp.) and nasturtiums (Tropaeolum majus).
Several autumns ago Marjorie scattered a handful of tiny Shirley poppy seeds, a gift from the garden of a friend, in a small corner of a perennial bed. The seeds germinated the following spring and the resulting plants grew to three feet in height, slender stems clad with blue-green leaves. In July, each stem was topped with a blossom, a single row of pink petals with the texture of crinkled tissue paper.
These first plants scattered their own seed and the following spring there were poppy seedlings growing throughout the garden, easy to recognize by their unique foliage. Most were weeded out, a few allowed to grow and blossom.
These poppies have been with us every summer since, growing among the strawberries, winding through the branches of blueberry shrubs, circling the compost bin. And there are still poppies in the corner of the perennial bed.
Throughout the summer day, these few poppies are among the first plants to catch the eye as you stroll through the garden. I have been in the garden at first light to watch the poppies greet the day, to see them swaying with the slightest breeze, the low-angled light casting stamen-shadows inside curved petals. At dusk the flowers glow, reluctant to give up the last rays of sunlight.
We do not know the variety name of these Shirley poppies — or corn poppies — which move about the garden from year to year. They are descendants of the wild red corn poppies immortalized in Canadian John McRae’s poem written during World War I, “In Flanders’ Fields the poppies blow, between the crosses row on row.” They were named in honor of the vicar of the parish of Shirley in England, the Rev. William Wilks, who discovered a variant of the local field poppy with a narrow white border around the petals. With careful selection and hybridization over many years, he obtained a strain of poppies ranging in color from white and pale lilac to pink and red. Further selection has given rise to semi-double and double forms, as well as flowers with a ring of contrasting color around the edge, a picotee form.
Shirley poppies are the only flowers in Marjorie’s garden that attract honey bees. This may be because the poppies appear in their relative abundance as a field of pollen-bearing flowers, always the preference for foraging honeybees, or perhaps it is the size of each flower, large enough to accommodate several workers at once. Luckily for a gardener afflicted with an allergy to their venom, the honeybees are too preoccupied with their work to feel threatened, even when I brush against a flower.
We always grow pansies in pots on the porch railings. Despite efforts to keep them floriferous by snipping off fading blooms, a few seed pods ripen on these plants, the seeds winding up in the beds beneath the porch. Each May, new seedlings appear in these beds beneath the spreading arms of elderberry shrubs, and, as the season progresses, these self-sown pansies bloom in colors totally unlike their parents. Volunteer pansies also populate the vegetable garden, introduced from the compost pile.
One year I placed pots of nasturtium among the vegetables to create a moveable feast for bumblebees. The following year, nasturtium seedling were popping up in beds where the pots had rested, evidence that their seeds can survive the winter. Yet there are years when there are no self-sown nasturtiums and we have to start with pots again. Perhaps winter survival of seeds is dependent on depth of snow cover.
Reeser Manley has a bachelor’s degree in biology, a master’s degree in botany, and a doctoral degree in horticultural science. He has 40 years of gardening experience, 15 of those years in Maine. For information go to http://gardeningintunewithnature.bangordailynews.com/.