Pretty pictures: Papaver orientale

Not my own plants; this is the garden of the same person who had the yellow and blue Iris that I posted on Sunday. Regrettably, none of the photos accurately convey how many of them there were, all doing the visual equivalent of screaming their heads off. The display is kinda wonderful, though the one big failing of this particular kind of Papaver is how brief the blooming period is. Is someone working on breeding some that bloom longer? Or are there already some that bloom longer that y'all just haven't told me about?

Pretty pictures: Papaver orientale

Sort of a good news / bad news situation from the vet, though in this particular case the good and bad news are the same thing:

We had more or less ruled out fleas previously, on the grounds that I've lived with fleas before, long ago, in Texas, and I remembered that vividly enough that I figured it would be perfectly obvious. But we hadn't seen any fleas jumping around or on us. We hadn't seen any fleas on Sheba.¹ I've been itchy a lot, but the flea bites I remember from Texas were big angry red things that lasted for days, and I haven't seen anything remotely like that, so I assumed that whatever the problem was, it couldn't have been fleas.² We still don't know what's going on with me, but it kind of goes without saying that fleas seem much more plausible now.

This is bad insofar as it's not the most desirable problem to have, and now there's a lot of work to be done as far as vacuuming and washing, but on the other hand, it was easily diagnosed and should be relatively easy to solve. Sheba doesn't have some exotic form of dog leukemia, she's not allergic to mold in the walls that would cost us thousands of dollars to fix, and she's not been driven to emo self-harm because we're not walking her enough.³ Just fleas. Could have been worse. And should it happen again, we'll recognize it much earlier, and won't have to let it reach this point a second time.

Anyway. Since I sort of promised plants with the title, and since I've just made you think about fleas for a few minutes, here are some pictures of Papaver orientale:

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¹ Still haven't, actually - I went through her fur with a flea comb after we got back from the vet, and I couldn't find any fleas or eggs. I don't know if I was looking in the wrong place, if there were never that many to begin with, or if they're just really difficult to find, but I believe the vet because A) he had a flea to show us, and B) he's a vet so you gotta figure he'd know. Though I suppose he could have a whole big glass jar full of fleas sitting in a back room somewhere, that dips into when he feels like selling some medication. (Yes, but am I paranoid enough?)
² In retrospect, it seems sort of obvious that Texas would have different kinds of fleas than Iowa, given the differences in climate and possible reservoir species. A flea that lives off lizards and armadillos in a region that rarely freezes would probably have different properties than a deer/squirrel/rabbit flea that has to survive winters of -10F / -23C.
³ (Though we are still going to try to walk her more.)

Saturday morning Sheba picture

No big Sheba news. No little Sheba news either, as far as that goes.

Unrelated: I noticed yesterday morning when I was out with Sheba that we had a volunteer Petunia in one of the beds (the one that never got weeded or watered and was full of whiteflies for the last month and a half of the summer because I am a bad outdoor gardener and because whiteflies like Cannas).

I like Petunias quite a bit, but we've never actually grown any here, or even attempted to, so this was a happy surprise. (Also a happy surprise: it color-coordinates with the blog.) We had a tiny peach poppy appear out of nowhere in early August, as well.

We might be able to explain the Papaver, as there's a chance it might have been in an old packet of "wildflower seeds" that we threw around the lawn just to see what would happen, but the Petunia is a mystery. Maybe seeds got blown through the fence from the neighbors' garden?

Pretty pictures: Papaver orientale 'Royal Wedding'

Not a particularly timely pair of photos (these were taken May 4 at the ex-job), but they're the best I've got at the moment.

Pretty picture: Papaver rhoeas

This is terribly out of date, of course. The photo is dated May 25. I had a last-minute change of heart about the post I'd originally planned for last Monday, and changing one thing meant changing other things, so I'm sort of scrambling for subject matter at the last minute, even though I actually have way more stuff going on here in the house than I can blog about already. It's complicated, and would be difficult to explain. Therefore, Papaver in January. Not that I expect many people will complain.

Pretty picture: Papaver nudicaule 'Champagne Bubbles'

I hadn't heard of Icelandic poppies (Papaver nudicaule) before a couple weeks ago. Actually, I didn't know much of anything about poppies at all, never having paid them a lot of attention. I'm learning, though. These remind me a lot of California poppies, Eschscholzia californica, despite not being shaped the same way, having similar foliage, or growing in similar locations. Maybe it's the colors?


I'm not terribly inclined to try to grow either one, having had two consecutive bad experiences with Eschscholzia (which is, by the way, hella fun to try to spell, though I'm not crazy enough to try to pronounce it), and being fairly unfamiliar with Papaver, though I'm not ruling out P. nudicaule just yet. We'll see.


These pictures were taken at a Home Depot somewhere in the Quad Cities, in case you want to know.