California Poppies
Saturday, and a very quiet one. Vanessa’s working in Folkestone this weekend, and it’s the first weekend since Kenadee & Bento returned to the States. I spent the morning finishing off the long tagging process for this photoblog — it’s been a mammoth task, going back over all 1,224 posts and assigning categories and tags for the new navigation system, but well worth it. I blitzed through the final three months of posts, and then enlisted Perplexity Computer to check for anything I’d missed. Monty, Dash and Rafferty had quiet days as well, occasionally emerging from their respective caves to graze in the kitchen. Milo has a boozy work outing this afternoon: first meeting friends to watch the football at the Crown & Sceptre, then joining the rest of the gang for a charity Darts evening in another pub. After dropping him off at the pub, I went for a short walk around the village to get a few steps in. Along the way, I spotted these bright orange flowers again, beautifully contrasted against the blue fence in the background.
The flowers are Eschscholzia californica — the California Poppy, and California's official state flower since 1903, though the Botanical Society of Scotland notes the plant has been a garden escape in Britain since at least 1864. Its story in cultivation goes back further still: the species was first formally documented in 1792 by the Scottish botanist Archibald Menzies, who collected seeds that were raised at Kew — but the plant was subsequently lost to science. It was rediscovered in 1815 by Adelbert von Chamisso, a Prussian poet-turned-botanist sailing aboard the Russian ship Rurik, who spotted the golden blossoms blanketing the hillsides around San Francisco Bay. He named it after his fellow voyager, the naturalist Johann Friedrich von Eschscholtz — giving us the tongue-twisting genus name that has challenged botanists and gardeners ever since. The Victorian garden writer James Shirley Hibberd summed up the sentiment perfectly: "Peace to his dust, honour to his memory, and may his name… be henceforth and for ever spelled correctly."
Despite sharing the Papaveraceae family with the opium poppy, the California Poppy contains no narcotic compounds — it is entirely safe to handle and admire, though it does contain its own mild alkaloids. Native Californian peoples used the plant medicinally for centuries: as a mild sedative, a painkiller, a treatment for toothache, and even an aid for sleep, and modern herbalists still incorporate it into tinctures and teas for anxiety relief. The flowers have a charming daily rhythm too, closing their four silky petals each evening and reopening only in sunlight — a behaviour botanists call nyctinasty, and the Spanish explorers poetically captured in their name for the plant: Dormidera, "the drowsy one." They also called it Copa de Oro — Cup of Gold — which perfectly describes those chalice-shaped blooms.
In its native California, the poppy is a marvel of resilience, thriving in poor, dry, sandy soils where little else will grow, and playing a remarkable ecological role as a soil stabiliser and pollinator magnet. In exceptional years following a wet winter, millions of seeds that have lain dormant in the soil suddenly germinate together, transforming entire hillsides into vast carpets of orange in what is known as a "super bloom." Here in Kent, of course, there are no super blooms — our reliably damp springs mean the seeds rarely need to wait — but the plant self-seeds prolifically and has naturalised happily across much of Britain, popping up on roadsides, waste ground, and old gravel pits. Sometimes the most photogenic things are right around the corner.
