Thursday, May 5/6, Buckingham

Now I'm at Flower Camp. Different windowsill. First poppies blooming here, and I'm thrilled to be able to share them in photos. Poppies are SO ephemeral!  And I think the annual poppies require some skill to grow. (You can't mulch everything heavily and expect tiny poppy seeds dropped the previous year to come up. For one thing, they require light to germinate. Just press them into the soil, or let them fall into uncluttered soil---usually the paths where nothing grew the previous year.)  I also jammed some cilantro and a ruff of rugosa rose into this bottle to help keep my poppies upright.  I've already stolen some cilantro from the back of this "arrangement" to use on a turkey/mozz cheese rollup. How convenient!  Second photo shows the cilantro and rugosa rose foliage stuffed into neck of bottle to keep poppies upright.

The other problem with poppies is that they will often wilt unless you condition them properly. Hoping to get away without conditioning them properly, I just jammed mine in the bottle, but, alas, (of course), they wilted.  The way to bring them back upright: give stems a fresh cut and then plunge them into hot water or singe the stems with a flame. I gave them the flame treatment using a wooden match. You won't believe this, but I used a flame because I didn't have hot water.  Next step: prop them up against something to help support the blooms and put them in a cool, dark place overnight. Here's are my poppies in "time out:"  reconstituting themselves overnight.  (They're under a table---cool, dark place.) 

Here's result, May 6, below: nice, staunch poppies holding their heads up the next morning. Bud isn't upright because I didn't provide it the support it needed to straighten itself overnight.

Love the way the cilantro stems are curling in the bottle!