I'm Not An Expert...

But I do get lots of questions... all my friends think I know everything, which is very flattering. If they only knew!

But this question came up in my comments:

I wanted to comment here because I had the weirdest thing happen with poppies this year.

I planted them for my first time, from Burpee - live plants not seeds. The leaves grew nicely, but I never got a tall stem on any of them. Then I noticed a bud in the middle of the leaf cluster, which eventually bloomed for a day or two. Just the flower right down at ground level in the middle of the leaves. The stem was all of 1/2 inch or so!

Any idea what might have caused this? Is it because this is the first year? I heard that some perennials don't bloom the first year they are planted...

-=kt=-

I gave it my best shot:

Well. Sandy soil or clay? And when did you plant them, as in: how soon after being put it the ground did they bloom?

I'm going to do some guessing.

These are probably the big oriental poppies. Burpee will propagate these by root division, and the plants themselves will be smaller the first year while they build up root strength. That would be part of what you witnessed.

My big guess is that you put them in only a few short weeks before they bloomed. Lots of plants are programmed by nature to bloom during a certain time of year - when the days reach certain length, the plant knows it is time to bloom. Poinsettias are a prime example of this. Many of the plants that lightly rebloom late in the season are blooming when the day hits that target length again. (Poppies, unfortunately, are not in this group.)

So if you put them in late enough, the plant only had so much time to prepare a flower, and it took a shortcut on producing the stalk.

As for the short bloom time, that is typical of poppies. They don't last but a day or two of glorious bloom. When the plants spread a bit, and they will, you will have a series of bloom stalks that will flower at slightly different times and the show will last a bit longer.

I think that next year your plants will perform to your expectations. If they don't, it will be time to write to the nursery.

Comments

[Kathy]

I remember a problem like this coming up in the Q&A column of Horticulture magazine. The person writing in was trying to grow Oriental poppies in the warmer part of California. They were having this same problem of the stem not elongating. The answer was: it didn't get cold enough for the poppies in the winter, and that was why they failed to grow flower stems.

[jenn]

Thanks!
I didn't know that. It may be that kt's were greenhouse grown for the propagation, and didn't get cold enough...