Thought I'd add todays photo of VP...it's better than the first one I posted. Tom...that happens to me all the time..this forum sure has been busy of late, hasn't it? Julie and Juliet :)..glad you find SLR to your liking. It is a fantastic dl. The clump shot of it on Tinkers is mine, if you'd like to see another photo of it. :) Jan

and thge Prince of Orange is an ORIENTAL poppy, completely different flower and leaves. This one has much different leaves and flower form... Yes, Prince of Orange is an Oriental poppy; its' the Oriental poppies that are true perennials, as a class of poppy. And the Prince of Orange is a double orange, just as the picture you showed. I'm not saying yours IS Prince of Orange, I used the owrds "similar to" above, but I used that as an example to point out the difference between a double and a single petalled flower that was orange. The Papaver somniferums can be slightly perennial and have very different light colored foliage with large leaves, but the regular old heirloom orange ones are typical Oriental types with typical dark green jagged foliage as opposed to somniferums which have light colored much larger leaves, often referred to as lettuce leaves. Is yours a P. somniferum with that lighter colored foliage with larger leaves which are very different from the typical Oriental poppy foliage? Carolyn

I've grown icelandic poppies for quite a few years. They like neutral to alkaline soil, at least 5 hours of full sun, preferably morning till around 2pm and mine have always bloomed well into August. It may take some time for your store purchased poppy to get well established in the ground with a good taproot system before it starts to send up more stems with buds on it. The plant that you purchased was grown in an artificial environment to become the size that it is and have buds and blooms on it when it was bought. It takes time for greenhouse grown plants to establish themselves in the garden beds. Right now your plant is no doubt growing a good root system and getting used to the new environment it has been put in; i.e. soil, temps. etc. Give it some time and you will see more and more stems grow out of the plant with plenty of blooms on it. You might want to let some of the flowers form a seed pod on it, let the pod dry and then sow the seeds on the surface of the soil around the existing plant. They will germinate with more plants. Or you could save the seeds till next spring and start the seeds then and have new plants germinate for you. Fran

Well, I will add a new mystery to the post. One of the few perennial plants that survived the 'lean years' before I bought this place was a huge clump of white summer phlox. Don't know the variety, but these plants got over six feet tall and bloomed solid white. This spring, because of all the construction, I moved them from a southern exposure that was relatively damp and that received shade from mid-afternoon on, to a spot with full southern exposure and that was hotter and drier. This year they were three to four feet tall and bloomed.....PINK. I can understand the lower height, since they received more sun, but the color change???? I was going to post this separately earlier in the summer, but didn't because everyone would think I was crazy. Which I am, but there's no need to belabor the point. narcnh