Browsing through the catalogs I saw some of the newer types listed as reblooming. They were Manhattan and Harlem, both of which look like they are in the same color range as Patty's Plum... so maybe they are sorta related? Rebloom would be a nice trick for the oriental poppies to learn!

I always leave some room in front of my Oriental Poppies for Zinnias after the bloom. They completely disappear in a short while. I don't know how large a patch you have, but, they do spread quite a bit, so it may safe to remove a few from the front and plant a row of annuals. Sometimes, they do transplant e.g. my largest patch is from a single discard given to me some years ago, so you may try transplating some from the front to the back.

Annette, I do nothing! They are in a sort of hidden area and I just let them die normally which they will do in hot weather. They are much too thick to inter-plant. In the fall, the new foliage comes back and gets about 6 inches before hard winter hits. Once you get these, you will have them forever. They are hard to transplant. I have given some to a neighbor but don't know if they made it or not. They have a long, carrot like root and it is almost impossible to dig without breaking it. They spread rampantly not like my other orientals that I started from seeds. I can't see that they have spread at all! I have a white and a pink, Victoria Louise, I think.

I bought a poppie wildflower seed mix and planted it in our roadside ditch on bare, unimproved mostly clay soil left exposed when the driveway was put in back in 1998 before we built the house. I have never tried the opium or breadseed poppies (Paper somniferum). Within a couple of months of scattering that seed mix and watering it (much less water than they said to give the mix because at that point we were only up here on weekends), I had a beautiful mix of poppies, including the corn poppies (papaver rhoeas) in red, pink and white (singles and doubles) and the Oriental Poppies (Papaver orientale). They were spectactular the first year and ever more spectacular the second year. After the second year they began to decline. Since they aren't supposed to do well in clay soil, I was probably lucky to get two good years out of them as they were in some pretty awful soil. However, they haven't gone completely away. The shirley poppies have reseeded themselves all over. The oriental poppies have not. Here's some of the places they popped up this year: In the gravel driveway down front by the road near where they were originally planted in the ditch. These are small this year due to lack of rainfall--only 4" to 6" tall and the flowers are smaller than usual too. In the ditch across the street from us. In the middle of the road in a small crack in the road. In the driveway beside my veggie garden, about 100' from where they were originally planted. In the south side of the veggie garden near the driveway in heavy soil soil that has been amended with compost and manure, but still remains very clay-ey. In the flower border on the north side of the garden which is largely unimproved clay. In the middle of the bermuda grass in my front yard. In the shrub border on the south side of my house, 300 feet from where they were originally planted. They are in the worst clay there. Didn't come up in the better improved clay. Doesn't make sense. In the extremely thick, horrible clay that surrounds my in-ground tornado shelter. I can't get anything but weeds and bermuda to grow in this soil, but it is covered in red poppies. They come back every year in this area and are very heavy this year, and quite tall, despite the lack of rainfall. In the wetter clay soil on the edge of my water garden. In the butterfly bed outside the northwest corner of my house. In a "waste area" about 150 feet behind my house where erosion has left cuts in the soil and uneven terrain that is hard to mow. This is their first year to pop up here. In the middle of my wildflower meadow area between the house and the woods. Only a few popped up here and couple of years ago, and there's only a couple of plants this year. The foliage ususally appears in April (but as early as late Feb. some years) and the flowers bloom in April/May. I deadhead them every now and then to extend the bloom period. In years with lots of rainfall they will sometimes keep blooming until mid-June. I haven't had as much luck with California poppies, which are smaller and get crowded out of my borders by more aggressive flowers that like our heat more. The first year I planted them, though, when there was nothing else around them, they were gorgeous. I had the tangerine-orange ones. I have tried Oriental poppies a couple of times since I bought that poppie seed mix, and they just didn't do well in my clay. I have grown a poppy seed mix I got from Renee's Garden Seeds that had very full poppies that looked like carnations. I planted them about 6 years ago. Their foliage is bigger and bolder than that of the other poppies I've grown. They get 2 or 3 feet tall and have only a few flowers, but the flowers they do have are gorgeous. They also did quite well for couple of years and then went away. They did bloom later than the red poppies--probably in the very late May to July timeframe. This year 2 of these plants popped up in my shrub bed and I have left them there to see if they will bloom. A friend of mine who has grown poppies for years says they do best if they are in soil that gets tilled or turned over every year. She thinks that if I were to rototill the soil in my ditch where I originally planted the poppy mix, either in the late winter or early spring, I would get a huge amount of poppies from the newly-exposed seed. I might try that next year. I just think of my poppies as "wildflowers" that will bloom for a little while and then go away. I enjoy them while they last, but know that they will only last a month or two. Dawn