Papaver lecoqii Lamotte
Yellow-juiced Poppy
The yellow-juiced poppy is a slender arable annual very closely related to the long-headed poppy — indeed it is often treated as a subspecies of it — and is likewise an archaeophyte of British farmland. The two look much alike, but this plant gives itself away by its sap: when a stem is snapped and squeezed, the milky juice quickly turns bright yellow on exposure to the air, where the long-headed poppy's stays white.
About
The yellow-juiced poppy is a slender arable annual very closely related to the long-headed poppy — indeed it is often treated as a subspecies of it — and is likewise an archaeophyte of British farmland. The two look much alike, but this plant gives itself away by its sap: when a stem is snapped and squeezed, the milky juice quickly turns bright yellow on exposure to the air, where the long-headed poppy's stays white.
It favours base-rich ground, being strongly associated with chalk and chalky, clayey soils and largely absent from acid land. The plant is fairly widespread in southern and central England, particularly where the soils suit it, and is often the first of the field poppies into bloom, flowering from around June to August. Its red flowers draw foraging bees, and it suits chalk-and-clay cornfield mixes and conservation headlands on calcareous arable soils.
Synonyms
Papaver cassandrinum · Papaver dubium lecoqii · Papaver dubium schweinfurthii · Papaver dubium subadpressiusculo-setosum · Papaver schweinfurthii · Papaver subadpressiusculesetosum · Papaver subadpressiusculosetosum · Papaver tenue
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