Plant Anatomy 101: The Roots of Good Things to Come
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- Carol Wallace
- KateBerry
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» Carol Wallace - Plants with tap roots
You're on the money there - I've tried a zillion times to transplant Oriental poppies and only succeeded once or twice. I always seem to dig about 1/4" too shallow and nick the things.But they are like dandelions, too. I once planted these lovely sounding poppies - pure white with what the catalog said was a crimson edge. They turned out to be white with a sickly orange edge - hideous! I have dig them out for five years running now. (Naturally, my husband has a huge aversion to my throwing out a plant so he made me find a place to plant the ones I dug up - and those are the ones that successfully transplanted.) And the good/bad news is - whatever root I left in the ground regenerated and every year I have white poppies with sickly orange rims coming back, just like the dandelions.
-- posted by Carol Wallace
» KateBerry - Putrid Poppies
Maybe there's a chance that my oriental poppies will survive after all, then. I'd ordered them from an online source (which I've since sworn I will never, ever order from again), and was very disappointed in their small size when they arrived. And, actually, I was extremely careful when planting them, since I really was looking forward to seeing their huge, pink blooms with a burgundy throat.But nooooo.... Despite watering them, babying them, keeping my fingers crossed and making small sacrifices to the gardening gods under a full moon, they all died. I never even got one bloom. Rather than dig them up (remember: I'm an optimist sometimes), I mulched around them and planted something else to hide the dead foliage.
My complaint letters to the online store have gone unanswered, so now I'm just boycotting them. (They were hideously overpriced, anyway.) I'll probably try some oriental poppies next year, but I'm going through my favorite online nursery next time. I haven't had anything fail that I've bought from them.
-- posted by KateBerry
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