Poppies

It is sometime after ten in the morning. I’m not wearing a watch, so don’t know the exact time, which suits me just fine, sitting at a late breakfast table on the deck in front of the house, the place I have come to fondly call my 'bower'. It’s a lovely word, isn’t it, so often used in the poems of the more romantic times of the 18^th and 19^th century. It expresses perfectly the summer peace I find here.

The little waterfall in the rock garden behind me is singing its soothing song, the bees are humming in the poppies to my right, and still the canola from the neighbour’s field across the road spreads it golden scent, heavy with honey.

These poppies are a pure delight! On the left side of the bed the Oriental Poppies with their ruffled crimson double blossoms have taken residence, while more to the right, towards the pond, is a thick stand of my favourites. Here, single blossoms sway gently in the breeze, in more shades of pink than I would have thought possible: almost-white to salmon coloured, passionate fuchsia to soft pastel, often edged in white. In the morning sunlight, delicate petals cast shadows on the next layer, the fringed, bristly little hub at its centre topped with a whitish ridged cap. No wonder that, in my childhood, we transformed these blossoms, or rather those of their wild cousins growing in fields of rye and barley, into little dolls with ruffled dresses, smoothing back the petals to make ballerina skirts. 

The other day I dead-headed the poppies, a task both necessary (to prevent the delight from being turned into dread: so quickly the tiny seeds can spread over the whole garden) and daunting because there were so many. I took my time, had my little ‘poppy meditation’, searching for yet another plump seed capsule that had escaped my searching eye. On each beheaded stem glistened a drop of yellowish sap, sealing off the wound, and the unmistakable scent of poppies enveloped me – that, too, rising from the depths of my childhood memory. 

‘Drows’d with the fume of poppies ...’ – this line from Keats’s ‘Ode to Autumn’ suddenly took on real meaning. How different it is to read something – quite sure of its meaning – and to experience it with our body, our senses, to truly know it all of a sudden.

The sun has traveled around and now lingers on my face: time to pack up and head for the garden, a paradise not only filled with flowers and ripening vegetables, but unfortunately still with too many weeds as well, side effects of yet another wet summer.