Buttercream

'Buttercream' is Renee's Garden's pale-yellow selection of California poppy, offered as an heirloom rather than a modern bred line. Where the wild species is a hot orange, this one opens a soft, silky cream-yellow, and that colour is the entire reason to grow it: it settles into a mixed border alongside pinks, blues and silvers in a way the species orange simply refuses to do. Blossoms are single and paper-thin, carried on slender stems that let them nod in wind above a low mound of finely cut grey-green foliage. It is a genuine perennial only in mild climates, rated hardy to USDA zone 8, and is treated as a spring-and-summer annual everywhere colder. Like the wild type it draws bees and butterflies, and it re-sows itself readily if seed pods are left to ripen and split.