Poppies are beautiful wildflowers with large, delicate petals that look like they are made of crinkled tissue paper! They are most famous for being a bright, sunny red color, but poppies can also be orange, yellow, pink, or even white. The golden California poppy is the state flower of California, and when millions of them bloom together, you can actually see the orange color from space! Poppy flowers open up wide in the sunshine during the day but close up tight at night and on cloudy days, almost like they are going to sleep.
When a poppy’s petals fall off, a neat little round seed pod is left behind that looks like a tiny pepper shaker with holes on top. When the wind blows, the seeds shake out through those little holes and scatter everywhere – one single poppy plant can make more than 60,000 tiny seeds! Poppy seeds can sleep underground in the dirt for many, many years and only wake up and grow when the soil gets disturbed. That is why poppies often pop up in places where the ground has been dug up. People have loved poppies for thousands of years, and farmers in ancient Egypt grew them in their fields long, long ago.
