My front garden was where I first tried to grow poppies. I had a 5-year old packet of red poppies and thought, "These will NEVER sprout, but certainly not if I don't plant them!" So I walked outside and went to my small flower bed and promptly flung them all over the bed without care! I hoped that maybe a few would sprout.

I was not prepared for what happened in the coming months. Instead of just a few, I think there must have been over 100 that sprouted and grew into a veritable WALL of red poppies!! Every morning I would come out and my jaw would drop at the incredible sight before me as new poppies opened! It was incredible. I fell madly in love with these flowers and watered them every day through our hot and unforgiving summer, and all the way until the first frost of winter killed the last of them. What a show! What a gift of beauty that continued month after month.

If that weren't enough, the next spring, without any input by me, these flowers had reseeded themselves and put on ANOTHER show!! I added a mixture of poppies that year and soon the red ones were joined by a rainbow of lovely blossoms of different types of poppies. Even without care, they put on another show last year. Not a speck of water from me and still, these prolific flowers greeted me with another glorious springtime show! They didn't last as long, but still, I was happy to see them blooming until June!

This picture is from May 2014, the year I had my raised bed garden, and here in my front garden I had irises and hyacinths and different kinds of allium (onion ), and others too. Seeing the poppies as the sun peeked over the hillside was a sight I relished, and I would be there with my camera to see the first rays of warm light shine through the crepe-like petals of these flowers I so adore.