February may have the fewest days, but it is the longest month for this gardener. I have grown weary of winter, want to see the ground again, to plant a seed. I long to discover where the poppies will grow in Marjorie’s summer garden.

Several autumns ago she scattered a handful of tiny Shirley poppy seeds in a small corner of the garden. The seeds germinated the following spring and the resulting plants grew to 3 feet in height, slender stems clad with blue-green leaves. In July, each stem was topped with a single blossom, a whorl of pink petals the texture of crinkled tissue paper.

These first plants scattered their fine seed to the wind and the next spring there were poppy seedlings growing throughout the garden, easy to recognize by their unique foliage. Most were weeded out, a few allowed to grow and blossom.

Last summer a few poppies blew amidst the strawberries, another wound its single stem through the branches of a blueberry shrub, a few more danced around the compost bin. All were allowed to go to seed. Where will they pop up this year?

We do not know the variety name of these Shirley poppies – or corn poppies – which move about the garden from year to year. They are descendants of the wild red corn poppies immortalized in Canadian John McRae’s poem written during World War I: “In Flanders’ Fields the poppies blow, between the crosses row on row.”

They were named in honor of the vicar of the parish of Shirley in England, the Rev. William Wilks, who discovered a variant of the local field poppy (Papaver rhoeas) with a narrow white border around the petals. With careful selection and hybridization over many years, he obtained a strain of poppies ranging in color from white and pale lilac to pink and red. Further selection has given rise to semi-double and double forms, as well as flowers with a ring of contrasting color around the edge, a picotee form.

Seeds of the classic red poppy seen in fields throughout Europe can be purchased from Johnny’s Selected Seeds. Some local garden centers may be offering seed packets of Angel’s Choir, a Shirley poppy mixture produced by Renee’s Garden Seeds. It is described as a celebration of the entire range of genetic diversity within the Papaver rhoeas species, containing fully double, semi-double and single flowers in shades of pastel pink, apricot, peach, cream, salmon and rose. The mix also contains rare cooler colors such as dove-gray and lavender, and even bicolors.

Poppy seeds are so small that you may want to mix them with sand before scattering them thinly over light, well-drained soil.

Do this as soon as the soil can be worked. While Johnny’s recommends covering the seed 1/4-inch deep, other sources insist that there is no need to do this. Simply scratching them into the soil with a garden rake seems to be sufficient.

This gardener longs to be in the summer garden at first light to watch the poppies greet the day, to see them swaying with the slightest breeze, the low-angled light casting stamen-shadows inside curved petals.

Or at dusk, watching the last light of the day slowly fade in the glow of their luminous petals.

Send queries to Gardening Questions, P.O. Box 418, Ellsworth 04605, or to rmanley@ptc-me.net. Include name, address and telephone number.