Poppy Heads Dried (Mixed Sized Heads)

The point at which a dried flower stops being a flower and becomes a sculpture. Each capsule is a smooth round pepper-pot topped with the star-shaped stigmatic disc, on a stem that dries to woody stiffness and needs no support. The pale tan reads as bone or driftwood against something dark, and against a pale wall the fine surface texture and the crown detail carry from across the room.

The mixed sizing is deliberate. Small pods run 2 to 3cm and work as accents, the largest reach 6cm and work as focal points, and having both in one bunch gives an arrangement rhythm that a uniform bunch cannot. Twenty stems in a tall vessel or an old demijohn is about as much statement as a single species can make.

Grown from our own Papaver somniferum crops on the Norfolk cutting field, cut once the pods have ripened and dried on the plant but before autumn weather starts to soften them, then finished in the barn. The colour weathers gently over years to a warmer, more worn tone, which suits the material rather than spoiling it. No dyes and no bleaches; pale tan is simply what a dried poppy head is. Sold for decorative use only.