PlantFiles: California Poppy
Eschscholzia californica

An easy annual with golden-orange and silky petaled flowers. Plants grow about a foot tall and a foot wide with finely cut gray-green foliage. Very tolerant of poor dry soils and will self seed abundantly.

This is the state flower for California, where it self sows readily in even dry, non-fertile soil. It easily covers the hills of the Napa Valley, in abundance.

It is a sunlover and it does not tolerate shade, and it absolutely does not like being transplanted.

I have not had good luck getting these to grow in my zone (7), in New Jersey.

Its a pretty plant and lives like a weed in out very poor hardpan soil....only thing is...IT LIVES LIKE A WEED and gets into everything...i am constantly weeding out poppies!

The yellow ones are easy but seldom resow as normally advertised. The other colors are not as easy to grow. I cast the seed directly on the ground.

Even in zone 4b, these self-sow freely and come up each year. But I have to live with where they want to come up, because I can confirm that they do not like transplanting. The extras are easy to pull out however... in fact, you don't even have to worry about pulling the root since they are an annual. They add splashes of color in the rock garden when not much else is blooming.

My plants at home bloom with orange flowers in the spring. In early summer, then they have smaller, yellow flowers.

The wild CA poppies of the Antelope Valley are the classic, large orange flowers. The wild CA poppies of the Santa Monica Mountains are smaller and yellowish. (These are Eschscholzia californica, not another species.)

I read that miners would look for stands of yellow CA poppies as they were indicators of mineral-rich soil. I don't know if that is true, as I get both colors from the same plant, depending on the time of year.

These are borderline winter-hardy in my Zone 7 dryland garden. Both old plants and seedlings appear every year. I weed them out of wherever I don't want them, and that's all the care they get. I haven't had any luck with the "fancy" (purple, pink, white) varieties from seed yet--I'll see how things go this year.

Not winter hardy in my area but I grow from seed sown in mid May. The poppies grow quickly and will take over the area in which their sown and give me continuous bloom from mid summer to frost. Delightful!

It is said that the plant contains substances that have slight narcotic, spasmolytic and analgetic effects... usually it can cause symptoms like nausea and vomit..

A great dryland plant. Starts blooming just as it begins to warm and early spring flowers are starting to fade. Here in So. Oregon they grow like a weed, getting started just after the fall rains hit and usually grow all winter, unless we have an unusually cold year, then seedlings spring up when it warms up. I pull them from where I don't want them and let the rest go.

These grow wild all over the Califonia hills. In early spring it is a great sight. They are so easy, asking for nothing

I have some 1-4" tall seedlings of CA poppy going right now. They're doing really well, unlike some other species of poppies I've tried to grow here. As far as being poisonous/narcotic... I really don't think it's either. It is said to have some ralaxing/calming properties and some people do indeed ingest it for these properties, but I have never heard of anybody getting poisoned. I, however, have never consumed CA poppy.

My first year growing these. I sowed outdoors very early spring, and now they are putting on such a show! They're so eye-catching. Hope it lasts.

I would never think 'eschscholzia' had anything to do with the poppy of my childhood...I have had these California lovelies in my yard all my life. My mom used to hold one up under my chin and say that if my chin glowed yellow, then I certainly liked butter! I would collect the seed pods every year, even if that really didn't need to be done since the plants always resowed themselves. The blossoms are so silky and delicate...a wild thing to treasure forever.

Grew these from seed in raised desert bed here in Western Arkansas, grew like crazy, I let them reseed a few times, and the seedlings and the bigger ones I didn't pull out lived all through winter here, we had 15-20 degrees a few nights, snow storms and a whole lot of rain, and everytime it warms up they just keep putting out more leaves.