Early summer mornings and the field poppies are blazing. Open and already reverberating with bumblebees as the sun spills over the hill behind us. They are the epitome of these long days and with growth reaching towards the summer equinox, you suddenly find they have elbowed their way in. By afternoon, the flowers that opened that morning will have done their work and shed their petals so that we see past them where they held our attention earlier and prevented us looking anywhere but into them. Next week, as if in response to the light once again tilting in the other direction, the plants will splay, their foliage yellowing as energy goes into making seed in the second half of summer. 

The field poppies (Papaver rhoeas) arrived here when we disturbed the ground. Seed that had sat happily dormant, but marked a time when the ground here was cultivated as market gardens and predated these pastures. Their reincarnation at Hillside is something we celebrate in the cultivation of the garden, for with the garden comes the opportunity of change, both the ephemeral and the more permanent. Pastures turned and ground exposed to give them what they need. Pioneer territory, light and, for a couple of years, the upper hand an annual needs in the perennial mix.