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to My Blue Heaven. |
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This website is devoted to the celebration of the Himalayan Blue Poppy, the most alluring, the most sought after of garden plants. It is, as Vita Sackville-West put it, "the dream of every gardener". It is the most alluring due to its sheer beauty, its perfect poise and the astonishing clarity of the blue. It is the most sought after because it is rarely seen and widely thought to be impossible to grow, listed even by experts as a formidable challenge. |
This website also portrays some of the kith and kin of the Blue Poppy; other species within the genus Meconopsis, found in a rainbow of colour at elevations above 10,000 ft. in the mountains of central Asia, from the Hindu Kush in the West, eastward to central China. Collectively, these plants are commonly known as "Asiatic Poppies". Meconopses belong to the poppy family (papaveraceae), but they are not true poppies (papaver), which are mainly native to North America and Europe. The name meconopsis comes from Greek, and means "poppy-like". (The word papaver is Latin and was the name given to the poppy in ancient Rome. It is thought to represent the sound of poppy seeds being chewed!).
This website is a companion to my book Blue Heaven: Encounters with the Blue Poppy, (TouchWood Editions, Victoria, British Columbia, Spring 2009). The book relates the history of the Blue Poppy, from its discovery in the 19th century, its introduction to British gardeners in the early 20th - with resulting near pandemonium among the public - to its spread in cultivation and the spontaneous development of many gorgeous hybrids.
Blue Heaven is the only account of the Asiatic Poppies currently available - only two have gone before, the last in 1989. The book provides detailed advice on successful at home propagation and cultivation of the Blue Poppy. It's also filled with anecdotes of the plant collectors who risked their lives to bring the Asiatic Poppies into cultivation, as well as accounts of my own visits to the world's finest collections in Scotland, and the passion of those who grow them.
Finally, the book is lavishly illustrated with photographs taken from my own collection of meconopsis and from gardens in Scotland. A few were captured in the wild, in central Sichuan Province, China, in the course of a plant hunting expedition. I used an old and rugged Pentax K1000 (slides), followed by a Pentax K200 (digital). A 70-300 mm zoom lens was usually attached, allowing precise framing and limited depth of field - a combination with best reveals the flowers in all their radiant splendour.
Canadian residents should be able to order Blue Heaven through a local bookstore. The retail price is $25. Failing that, or if you live in the USA or overseas, please direct enquiries to me at batesterry@dccnet.com
I live and I garden in the Pacific Northwest, not very far from Vancouver. This corner of Canada is as good as it gets in North America for growing Asiatic Poppies. My own collection is probably the most diverse on the continent. By "diverse", I'm referring to the variety of meconopsis species, hybrids and named cultivars (magnificent, garden originated, sterile forms of the Blue Poppy). It's certainly not the largest collection. That distinction belongs to Les Jardins de Métis, on the St. Lawrence estuary in the Province of Quebec, which has a historic, massed show of some ten thousand plants of a single species of Himalayan Blue Poppy, M. baileyi, quite possibly the world's largest single display. How this came about is also related in my book.
BillTerry ©
Praise for Blue Heaven:
"With wit and erudition, author Bill Terry examines the world of the fabled Himalayan Blue Poppy and its relatives. Ranging from the slopes of the high Himalayas, through the gardens of contemporary poppy lovers, Terry -- himself an accomplished Meconopsis grower -- also provides clear guidelines for the successful cultivation and propagation of these notoriously temperamental beauties. But buyer beware! Meconopsis obsession may ensue."
Des Kennedy, author of Crazy about Gardening.
"An irresistable book. Bill Terry's ardent account of the fabled Blue Poppy is elegant, humorous, and bracingly practical -- a master class in gardening, the record of a thirty year passion, a chronicle of other gardeners and plant hunters equally possessed. Author and subject are a match made in heaven. I loved the book all the way to the end."
Elizabeth Hay, author of Late Nights on Air, winner of the 2007 Scotiabank Giller prize.
Note: The Blue Poppy shown on the book cover (left) and at Les Jardins de Métis (below) is now correctly named meconopsis baileyi, rather than m. betonicifolia, as it used to be. It’s named for Frederick M. Bailey, a British Army officer and dauntless explorer, who found this most famous of the Blue Poppies in 1913, in the course of a hair-raising exploration of the Tsangpo river gorge in Tibet. Bailey pressed a single bloom in his wallet and, weeks later, sent it to David Prain, Director of Kew Gardens. On the evidence of this tattered specimen, Prain reckoned it was a new species of Asiatic poppy, and named it for the finder-- m.baileyi. Twenty years later, the botanist and meconopsis expert, George Taylor, decided that Prain was wrong. The poppy was merely a regional variation of meconopsis betonicifolia, found by the Jesuit missionary and plant collector Père Delavaye in northern Yunnan, c. 1885, and not different enough to warrant naming as a distinct species. So, m. betonicifolia it became and remained so until 2009, when Christopher Grey-Wilson made a thorough study of the Yunnan and Tibetan Blue Poppies, determined they differed on several basic structural features – and booted Bailey’s poppy back to its original name, meconopsis baileyi.
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Meconopsis baileyi at Les Jardins de Métis. |
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Meconopsis integrifolia -- 13,000 ft., near Kangding, Sichuan |
Meconopsis speciosa -- 15,500 ft., Galung La, Tibet |
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M. 'Lingholm' |
M. grandis |
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M. 'Mrs. Jebb' |
M. baileyi 'Hensol Violet' |
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M. aculeata |
M. 'Crarae' |
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Rosemary
with the Satin Poppy--M. napaulensis hybrids. |
