Summer came early!

Bailey Park, Abergavenny, April 8th

Yes, I know we English are known for our partiality to discussing the weather, but the past few weeks really have been extraordinary!

Most of  March was sunny and warm - sitting-outside-in-shirtsleeves weather! - and the driest month for 50 years, apparently. When the month ended with a few days of wind and rain, I thought it was 'going out like a lion' and that we'd revert to our normal, less than wonderful, British weather. 

But no, we've been enjoying almost wall-to-wall sunshine and daytime temperatures that should belong at the end of May, even though it seems such a short time ago that we were comparing the depth of our snow on Twitter! It looks as if it's on the change now, though and maybe that was our summer?

Bailey Park, Abergavenny, 8th April

 
Most of the daffodils are long gone and dead-headed and these tulips in the park won't last much longer so I 'snapped' them on my way back from shopping on Friday.

So now I think I've posted images of the park that I cross to go shopping in all seasons.

Bailey Park, Abergavenny, 8th April

But here's the big shock!

I opened my back door to the garden a couple of mornings ago and, just outside, I found this!

Iceland Poppy, early April, 2011

The back of the seed packet says that it should start flowering in June, but this is one from last year that survived the record low winter temperatures - although you can see that the pot was less hardy! - so maybe that, as well as the remarkable weather, is why it is flowering so early?

Meanwhile, I've sown some Icelandic Poppy seeds, hoping that I might be lucky and get some pink ones. But the seeds are tiny and have germinated in clumps so I'm afraid a great many of them will have to be discarded. That's something I don't feel very comfortable doing - I have a book called, 'Plants are like People' and I tend to agree!  

I've also spotted buds on several of my roses and I have the feeling that I shall soon be working on photographic images for my greeting cards etc rather than drawings and paintings. Last summer was like that and the poppies were an especially fruitful source of designs. The one above featured on coffee mugs and even Keds shoes as well as greeting cards - as you can see here.

Poppies

Poppies seem to have a particular appeal for artists.

Monet certainly painted them several times but he's not the only one; they seem to be an 'easy' subject for amateur artists too, maybe because those vivid red splashes of colour are so easily identifiable and make such an immediate impact?

Then again, in close up, they are, to my mind, the unbeatable champions of 'gesture' in the floral realm and it's for that reason as much as their colours that I love painting them.

But I grew up believing that all poppies were a pale orange colour. They seemed to grow everywhere - in our garden, in the paths, on bombsites and waste ground. And I always loved them, not so much for their colour as for their graceful curving stems and nodding heads, that made them seem somehow more alive than other plants. I never really associated those poppies of my childhood with the flat red artificial Flanders poppies that we wear on Remembrance Day.

But in Norfolk I was introduced to red poppies, sometimes called Shirley or Corn Poppies, in all their glory! And I painted them. But unfortunately, my pastel painting of poppies and daisies on the edge of a North Norfolk cornfield, was framed and given away long before I had a scanner so the best I can manage is a scan of an old pre-digital photo of it -

. 
As you travel towards the North Norfolk Coast, outside Cromer and Overstrand, you really can't miss the red swathes of poppies growing wild in the cornfields! In fact a 19th Century London journalist, Clement Scott, came to Overstrand in 1883, fell in love with the poppies, as well as the local miller's daughter, named the area 'Poppyland' and wrote about it in the Daily Telegraph.

A friend in Hereford is lucky to be able to grow these black-centred, scarlet poppies in her flowerbeds -

- which gave rise to these:

Garden Mug by helikettle
ceramic mugs made online with Zazzle

And a local neighbour's large, oriental-type poppies have been immortalised in this oil pastel painting, as greeting cards, mugs and even shoes!

 

'Poppies' Slip-on Sneaker by helikettle
Get custom made shoes at zazzle.co.uk

I've tried to grow poppies from seed in my garden in Abergavenny with no success at all - the same goes for cornflowers which have thrived in my previous gardens so I suspect the soil is too heavy. My only success has been with the Californian variety, which I'm very fond of,

- so last year I raised some Icelandic Poppies from seed indoors and planted them in tubs and pots outside my kitchen door, where they flowered cheerfully and resulted in my most popular watercolour greeting card -

 

Garden-lover's Mug by helikettle
View other Mug Mugs

  

Icelandic Poppies Bookmark by helikettle
Make full colour business cards at zazzle

However they didn't seed themselves as I'd hoped so I was pleased to find some for sale in pots at the Garden Centre my son and I visited on my birthday before we came across the ponies. I was also somewhat bemused to see pots of these for sale -

- surely a weed by anyone's reckoning (though one definition of a weed is 'a plant growing in the wrong place'!)

It would have been far cheaper to have grown my poppies myself but time has been short this Spring so I dutifully paid the price with my voucher and we carried them in carrier bags for the rest of our walk, trying not to damage their fragile petals.

They survived and once they'd settled in to their new homes in the pots by my door, they've begged me to photograph them daily!

It's not always been easy to capture their brilliant, almost translucent colours - I'm sure that a more professional photographer would have found a way - but these are just a few that came out reasonably well -






I think I'm going to try following this advice and, if the seeds are still available in the shops, I'll sow some in pots, ready for next year...

These are some of the greeting cards in which I've tried to portray the 'daintiness' that is part of their charm -

 

As for these, they show a different, more flamboyant aspect of the poppy's personality, I think!

 

Golden Poppies Ladies Slip-on Keds Shoes by helikettle
Create your own shoes at zazzle.co.uk

 

 

And, by the way, if anyone would ever like to use any of my photos, flowers or otherwise, as a reference for painting or drawing, just send me a message and I'll gladly email you a larger version.