Poppies !

The poppies are blooming, everywhere. Bright, orange poppies. They grow along the side of freeway entrance ramps, and in the strip between the sidewalk and the street. The plants pop up, seemingly out of nowhere, frilly floppy stems a muted green color, in the springtime during the rainy season, where seeds have been dropped from flowers the previous year.

I planted poppy seeds last year, in a planter box that I stuck on top of strip of dirt along the driveway where it gets a lot of sun at mid day. This year, they popped up, not in the planter box, (which I might add is now filled with weeds) but in the hardpacked dirt alongside the planter box, between the planter box and the house. That is where they seem to thrive best. Not in the planter dirt which I spent hours nurturing with compost and other soil nutrients last year. Nope. They like the plain old undisturbed dirt.

Someone once defined weeds as "plants that grow where you don't want them to grow". Poppies are weeds, in the truest sense of the word. And yet, we love them so, these bright harbingers of warmer weather and longer days to come.