In the Pink (& Purple)

 

I was at my garden club last week, and pricked up my ears when I heard someone mention poppies. (I Love Poppies.)

It was a rainy day and so it was good weather, I heard, to sow poppy seeds, particularly the lovely Shirley poppies, named for the place they arose. Annual plants, a form of Flander's (or Field) poppies, and oh-so-charming. I'll toss some seeds over the mulch in my pink-and-silver bed and press down, hoping it's not too darn cold for them. (They produce masses of seeds so I collect some each year - if they've germinated and grown.)

The Shirley poppy strain (below) was developed from 1880 onwards by the Reverend William Wilkes, vicar of the parish of Shirley in England. Wilkes found a variant of the red field Flander's poppy (Papaver rhoeus) (last pic) that had a narrow white border around the petals, in a corner of his garden adjoining arable fields. By careful selection over 20+ years he developed a strain of poppies ranging from white, pink and pale lilac. (Papaver rhoeus are ruderal (they grow on waste ground) and segetal (they grow in cornfields) so seeing them popping up around the Forum in Rome in late spring some years ago was magical. They filled some corn fields near Monet's garden (at Giverny) in France, too, and we sat, eating our picnic lunch, surrounded by them in May.)

I look around the winter garden and I see some pink: the lovely little myrtaceous flowers of two thryptomenes, some small cerise Cyclamen coum and the candy-pink of Bergenia. A few pink and plum hellebores are starting to peep out.

 

There's some pink - almost purple in the potager, too. What were bought as purple broccoli have developed into another brassica, cauliflowers with heads rather cerise-mauve, probably `Sicily Purple' (second pic). I wouldn't have bought these, because I've never had success with cauliflower, which are usually, for me, adorned with copious caterpillars and little greens critters and even soft rot. Oddly, my broccoli have never succumbed to any of these (yet). But I'm pleased to have this lovely little success with a new plant, and I'm just waiting to see if it's as delicious as it is striking. And, importantly, do the florets keep their colour when cooked? One way to find out!

Later...

So my pink-purple cauliflower changes to green when cooked, just like the (unrelated) purple peas and beans. Florets roasted with green and chartreuse broccoli (`Romanesco'), topped with grated parmesan cheese, made an...interesting side dish. But I'm chatting with a friend who mentions purple potatoes; potatoes with flesh of purple which cooks to a nice mauve. (She didn't know the type (maybe `Purple Peruvian', `Purple Majesty' or `Vitilette'), so I'm thinking of searching for one of these - and the more purple, the better.

We already have a potato bed, in an old corrugated iron tank, filled with kipfler potatoes. Maybe we need another potato bed...

Jill Weatherhead is horticulturist, writer, garden designer and principal at Jill Weatherhead Garden Design who lives in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne, and works throughout Victoria. (www.jillweatherheaddesign.com.au)