Poppies: The Poppy Family in the Wild and in Cultivation Book

A field of common red poppies growing wild by the roadside can transform an ordinary landscape into a place of mystery--their fervent, insistent color seems designed to take the breath away. For readers who've fallen under the poppy's spell, Christopher Grey-Wilson's Poppies: A Guide to the Poppy Family in the Wild and in Cultivation is an exhaustive work of research and classification of this remarkable and mysterious flower.

The book starts out with a brief, no-nonsense introduction that serves as a road map to the reams of information contained in the subsequent pages. Grey-Wilson, botanist and editor of Alpine Garden Society, has organized the poppy family into four main subfamilies: the Chelidonioideae, Eschscholzioideae, Papveroideae, and Plastytemonoideae. Within these subfamilies a series of varieties are delineated. In entries of varying length, Grey-Wilson provides information about zoning, propagation, advice on garden placement, and various other remarkable and somewhat unpredictable details. While some poppies described here can be found at any local garden store, others are not in cultivation and were last sighted in Turkey or Iran. Containing 182 color photographs, Poppies will satisfy readers who want more than just the basics, who want the whole scientific story, and then some. --Emily White

Poppies, first published in 1993, was the first book devoted exclusively to these most loved and cherished of plants. Not only are the true poppies, genus Papaver, covered, but all the other members of the poppy family as well. This includes the horned poppies Glaucium, the tree poppies Dendromecon, the California poppies Eschscholzia, the desert poppies, Arctomecon, the prickly poppies Argemone, the pygmy poppies Canbya, the plumed poppies Macleaya, the blue poppies Meconopsis, the long fruited poppies Roemeria, and many more. There are general chapters on the family, cultivation and classification, and a key to genera. The individual genera, grouped into their respective subfamilies, are dealt with, including coverage of their more specialised cultivational requirements. Grey Wilson has concentrated primarily on species and forms in cultivation, together with those species of striking or particular interest that are not present in cultivation but fully deserve to be introduced For this new edition, the author has included much new information about recent discoveries in the wild, as well as new cultivars introduced since Poppies was first published in 1993.