Poppies gone wild

Wet morning, just drizzle, and the poppy patch is at an end, but it's not going out without a final hurrah, and this is being supplied by the wild poppies – the ones that self-seed, pop up, flower for a day, then disappear. They're orange people, almost every one of them, but not quite. After all, they're wild, and there's always a misfit or two in a wild bunch, isn't there?

All the poppies in bloom this morning are orange. These wild poppies aren't quite the same luminous, clear orange that you find in Californian poppies. They're a deeper hue, decorated in the middle with a splodge or two of black. These short-lived poppies are the self-seeded second generation, whose parents were the white, red, pink or yellow Iceland poppies I planted last April.

The faded Iceland poppies still put on an interesting show, but not of flowers. At the end of their brief careers, the party is over for them. Still, it was a good one, just like last year. They started flowering in June, then powered through July, August, September and most of October. Then they just ran out of puff in early November and it's over.

Rewinding for a moment, this is the patch of seedlings back in May this year.

A few months later and it's chugging along, never sending up spectacular drifts of lots of blooms, but always sending up a vase-full or two for use indoors. As well as feeding the plants monthly with a flower-booster fertiliser, my main job through this time was to deadhead the faded flowers, and I am sure this helped keep the show going for a month or so longer. Poppies are easy to deadhead - you can pluck stems with your fingers - and so each morning I'd spend two minutes picking 10 or 15 spent stems, to prevent seed pods forming and encourage more blooms to come up.

However, while deadheading I'd occasionally miss one or two spent blooms, and these then self-seeded and a while later the wild plants started to come up. This morning, the scene was all-orange, and the bees were flocking in.

Bees are the hardest people to photograph because they never stay still. They adore poppies of all sorts, visit my patch each day, and they'll be really disappointed when I pull up the remnants of the patch this weekend and replant it. But a few months later there'll be yellow and gold zinnias aplenty for them, so their disappointment won't last long. Life goes on, for bees as well as gardeners.

As mentioned earlier, most of the wild poppies are orange, with the odd black blotch.

However, being wild things, they come up in other colours, notably in the lilac and purple end of the spectrum and these are my favourites. Only one in 50 wild ones is in this colour group, and it's such a thrill to see one raise its pretty head for a day. For a moment it feels like I'm in an unfenced meadow somewhere and not in the inner-city with planes droning overhead.

And so ends our second year of poppy-patching. Poppies are my wife Pam's favourite flowers, and I was quite proud of my efforts last year to provide her with five months of pickable poppies to bring inside. They look so nice indoors and Pam uses them so prettily. Now, with two good years behind us, we might as well do it again next year. It has become a tradition!

Spring's prettiest weeds

I have no-one to blame but myself for some of the weed problems here in my garden. At least this is a pretty problem and also not an especially bad one. Whether I like it or not, spring is a time when a variety of flowers pop up uninvited. And every one of these 'pretty weeds of spring' were originally brought home by me from a garden centre.

First, some introductions. This is Ingrid, our quiche, pie and flan gnome. Her little flower companions go by a couple of names – heartsease and Johnny Jump-Up – but essentially they're a form of viola. They come up all around the garden – more often in shady or semi-shady spots.

While the darker coloured heartsease surrounding Ingrid are the most common, other colours occasionally come up from seed, and they're very pretty.

Primulas compete with the Johnny Jump-ups for weed rights in the semi-shade. While the original ones planted were white, all the weedy ones which self-seed every year are these pinky colours.

Here, the primulas seem to be competing with the Johnny Jump-ups for the same square inch of soil. I leave them to it if they aren't bothering anything else. The primulas, being bigger at the base, usually win.

Alyssum is a sun-lover that I plant in pots to decorate my succulent patch, but it's so hardy and self-seedy that it comes up in cracks in the paving. Last autumn I grew a purple coloured alyssum for a change, and I've noticed little patches of purple self-sown alyssum coming up here and there along the pavers, as well as the much more common white form.

It's with some trepidation that I have decided to re-introduce impatiens into the garden. It took me years of very persistent weeding to get rid of the first infestation. I've only ever liked the white form, but the weedy form comes up pink or red, not my favourite flower colours. This plant is in a planter mounted on the back wall of the house, at least three metres from the nearest patch of soil, and while it has dressed up the wall nicely, I'm keeping a close eye on any suspiciously impatiens-like seedlings coming up anywhere else.

The same thing is happening in my poppy patch this year as happened last year. Though I try to be a good boy about deadheading spent flowers, I always miss a few, and that's enough to send up these wonderful looking wild poppies amid all the other poppies. These flowers don't last as long as the cultivated Iceland poppies, but they're always a welcome sight.

If I've included a photo of Ingrid, our flan and quiche gnome, I might as well include one of her love interest, Mitchell, our Librarian gnome. Mitchell is surrounded by a sea of native violets, and these are weeds of a creeping, relentless, invasive sort.

The best I can hope for with native violets is to limit their spread. As these tenacious little groundcover plants like semi shade and well-moistened soil, they occupy the fairly well-watered ground beneath my espaliered lime tree.

It's ironic that 'self-seeding' seems at first to be such a low-maintenance benefit in a plant. "What, you don't even have to plant it, and it just comes up by itself each year? Wonderful."

Unfortunately, the reality is that self-seeding plants also come up here, there and everywhere each year: in pots, in the middle of the vegie patch, in garden beds where you're trying to coax something far more tender and delicate into life (like my poor little easily-bullied cyclamen). You don't just get a couple of self seeding flowers. You get hundreds of them. They can be a pest, just like any other weed.

And so the self-seeders have become just another part of my weeding workload. I pull most of them out when I see the seedlings forming, yet I always also allow the odd one to grow on where they will prove both pretty and harmless. And of course quite a few manage to spring up and flower where I don't want them to, despite my best efforts. I don't really mind. They're as much a part of this garden as I am, in the end. And they're prettier than me.