Common Poppy Papaver rhoeas
The common poppy is a hardy plant, widespread through the Norfolk countryside. The scarlet petals are instantly recognisable and best seen in the summer months.
Conservation status in Norfolk
Not threatened. To see a whole wheat or barley field stained red with poppies is no longer a common sight in Norfolk. Two factors explain this decline. Firstly the more efficient cleaning of cereal seed prior to sowing means that poppies are no longer dispersed with the seed-corn. Secondly the development and use of powerful herbicides to increase yields have enabled farmers to have largely weed-free cereal fields – a breaking of the ancient link between cereal farming and poppy growth. However poppies remain a common plant on disturbed ground and along roadsides.
How to help
The poppy is one plant which is capable of looking after itself. This species remains widespread and common though other arable weeds such as cornflowers and corncockle have vanished as wild plants in the Norfolk countryside. Organic farming, which avoids the use of selective weed killers, is beneficial to arable weed species including poppies.
Common Poppy: David North
Common Poppy: David North
Information on the Common Poppy
How to recognise
The translucent, papery-petalled scarlet flowers and the ‘pepper-pot’ seed capsules are distinctive. Common poppies vary greatly in height. Some specimens growing in the cracks of pavements and roads struggle to make 30cm in height whereas others in fertile field conditions can reach 60-90cm tall. Occasionally white or pink poppies can be found flowering amongst normal blooms. All the green parts of the poppy plant, both leaves and flower stalks, are covered in fine hairs. Flowers only last a single day when fully open, then numerous seeds develop within a distinctive egg-shaped capsule. Individual plants have many flowers and so it is often possible to see flower buds, fully open flowers and seed capsules all together on a single plant.
Where to see
Poppies are still found widely across Norfolk. They grow on embankments, building sites, patches of waste-ground and along road-side verges. They remain a common weed of arable farmland and gardens. Whilst it is rare today to find a whole field ablaze with poppies, areas of farmland set-aside and unsprayed field margins may still be dominated by poppies, a species capable of colouring whole landscapes when conditions are right.
When to see
The best months to look for poppies are June, July and August. Poppies are annual plants with some seedlings germinating in the period when soil is cultivated or disturbed. Between April and June there is rapid growth and the first flowers usually appear in June. The peak of the flowering season is July and August, though some plants continue to flower into September. Many seeds germinate in autumn with the ploughing of stubble fields. Growth is slow in the winter months and the seedlings go largely unnoticed.
Did you know?
The Norfolk coast between Sheringham, Cromer and Overstrand is known as poppyland – a name first given to this area by the writer Clement Scott in the 1880s. Today the common poppy has been voted the county flower for Norfolk.
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