Seed successes

Some of the most beautiful (and easiest) flowers you can grow from seed

Self-seeded Papaver rhoeas ‘Amazing Grey’ - not quite as grey as they were last year!

I always go slightly over the top when it comes to sowing flowers from seed as I love the whole process of it. This year has been no different, and I’m still nurturing things in pots that haven’t quite made it into the ground yet, but a good number have been planted out into pots and borders, and are doing well. This is my round up of what I’ve grown this year.

The beautiful ‘Amazing Grey’ poppy pictured above actually illustrates a failure rather than a success, which shows how much the camera can lie. I sowed fresh seed of this poppy straight into the ground in early spring and not one germinated, probably washed away in all the rain we’ve had. This one is a self-seeded flower from last year’s crop, one of only a handful that popped up this year, and as you can see it has started to change colour, reverting to the wild red Papaver rhoeas as it isn’t genetically stable. The distinctive lavender-grey colour, shown below, is how they bloom in their first year, but in subsequent years they start morphing into a different colour range - no less beautiful because of it I think.