Meconopsis blue

Those of you who enjoyed seeing the emergence of my Himalayan blue poppy in 2025 may be interested to know how it has fared this year.

The poppy began flowering on May 18th (almost exactly the same day as 2025) and is still doing so today, June 9th (carrying its final bloom alongside six healthy seedheads)

I would say that the plant seems much stronger and healthier this year (I think my heavy winter mulching must have helped) and, over the past few weeks, its flowers (whose fallen petals I have pressed) have been a daily source of blue delight.

This poppy really is a very interesting shade of blue: a blue that somehow manages to be, at one and the same time, quietly soft and powerfully vivid . . .

In some lighting conditions, its a blue that becomes quite definite . . .

. . . but under very bright sunlight often adopts a hazy and ethereal quality. . .

And this is a blue that does not only change with the light and weather, but also over time.

Each petal fades a little, as it ages. . .

. . . and its later-flowering blooms have much more pink and purple in them than those which first appear. . .

In all its incarnations, then, this poppy is a most unusual kind of blue

Certainly, my garden contains no other plant whose colour is quite like it. . .

. . .and I’ve found it interesting that my old (and much prized) British Colour Council / RHS colour chart also includes nothing that is quite like meconopsis blue.

While the shadecard includes many horticultural examples on the blue-violet end of things . . .

. . .there are relatively few examples among the more definite blue-blues . . .

. . . while the majority of the paler blues on the shadecard include no horticultural examples at all.

It’s very notable, I think that while pale blues, or blues in the middle of the range are frequently compared to manufactured objects or industrial processes. . .

. . . those towards the purple-violet end of the spectrum find their standard referents in the natural world.

Observing the shifting blues of my meconopsis in recent weeks has been a really useful exercise in understanding that the colour of a plant or flower is never really one shade only, it’s never self-identical . . .

. . .but that, like all colours in a garden, these blues are changing all the time . . .

What, then, is meconopsis blue? Does it even make sense to speak of this flower -or any flower – as possessing, as my old RHS shade card would have it, a definable “standard” colour?

Regarding the blue of my meconopsis as something completely weather-and-light contingent, as something that is infinitely variable, does not detract from my delight in this intriguing colour . . .

. . . rather, my understanding of the shifting, transient qualities of this poppy’s luminous wash of blue – and my daily encounters with its daily changes – makes me appreciate the brief appearance of this colour in my garden much more deeply.

Which changing colours do you enjoy in your garden?

Thanks to Tom for photographing the progress of the poppy so beautifully over the past few weeks.