Papaver rhoeas – the common red sidewalk crack poppy.
It’s red sidewalk crack poppy season in Albuquerque.
It’s a weird ecological niche, but Papaver rhoeas, the common corn poppy (it has a bunch of other names) seems to have mastered the sidewalk cracks in my neighborhood.
Sciency people call it an archeophyte, a species that arose in its modern form in an evolutionary dance with humans. It occupies one of those fun biological spaces that challenges our notion of “natural.” Our ancestors started plowing and planting cereal crops, and the poppy hopped onto the agrarian train. Its ability to scatter lots of seeds, which can hang around for a long time waiting for the right opportunity to sprout; its fondness for disturbed soil and open, sunny fields, and such. The rapid selection pressure ramped up its evolutionary adaptive response. One thing I read even suggested that it shifts its germination and flower patterns to local climate and cropping.
We’ve got a few this year in a flower bed out front that we dug up and replanted over the winter – disturbed earth! There’s a house over by the park that has a nice unintentional bed of them in its front yard.
And they’re everywhere right now in our sidewalk cracks.
I wondered about its movement north over the years, a block or two at a time.
jfleck–
Nice posting. I did not see the photo initially, so the title that included the word “crack” threw me momentarily.
In this timeframe of the vernal equinox, Easter, the passing of winter, spring arrival and renewal of growth, your thoughts about Survival Poppies are most welcome.
-Bill Hilton
I’ve had grape hyacinths growing in the expansion cracks of my driveway for years. They do much better there than in the flowerbed.