4 tips for planting, growing and even baking with poppies

Poppy family members are papery beauties, with over 50 species of annuals and perennials with crinkled, cupped blooms reminiscent of crêpe paper. Follow these four helpful tips if you're growing them in your garden.

They come in a range of solid and bicolour shades, with single or double blooms.

• The easiest poppies to grow are often called corn, Flanders or Shirley poppies (Papaver rhoes) — the same dainty but hardy annual that turns the fields of Europe into seas of scarlet in spring.
• Now naturalized in North America, corn poppies self-sow readily, so plant them where they can spread.

Grow poppies in full sun in rich, very well-drained soil.

• Sow them first thing in spring in cooler climates.
• Sow seed directly, because the poppys' long taproot makes them difficult to transplant.

In spring, be prepared to protect your plants from hungry rabbits.

For all the beauty of their blossoms, poppies have coarse, hairy foliage that some find unappealing.

• Plant poppies behind other ornamentals that will shield their leaves and fill in the gaps as they slowly fade away.
• Pull foliage when it begins to turn brown.
• Many people gather the dried seed capsules on long stems and use them in dried flower arrangements.

Grow poppy seeds for baking.

• Almost as easy to grow as corn poppies, bread seed poppies (P. somniferum) produce big flowers followed by egg-shaped seedpods that are full of black, edible seeds.
• Be sure to wait until the seedpods turn brown to harvest seeds for eating, and set aside some to replant next year.

One poppy is particularly demanding, but worth it.

• The Iceland poppy (P. nudicale), a biennial grown as an annual, is the hardest to grow, but its silky petals are the most intensely coloured and seem to glow with an inner light.
• This heavy bloomer, with up to 50 flowers per plant, is ideal for cutting. Sow in late summer for blooms the following year.