Common poppy

The California state flower - a drought-tolerant southwestern native perennial (grown as annual outside zones 8-10) producing iconic vibrant orange (sometimes yellow, pink, red, or white in cultivars) cup-shaped flowers that open in sun and close at night or in cloudy weather. Naturalizes readily via self-seeding; among the most reliable hot-dry-site wildflowers for borders, meadow plantings, and rock gardens. Family Papaveraceae but unrelated to the opium poppy (different chemistry, no narcotic alkaloids).

A fast, sun-loving member of the aster family grown as a warm-season annual, Gaillardia pulchella throws a long succession of 2-inch daisy-like flowers from early summer until frost. The ray florets blaze in bands of red and gold around a darker domed center - the firecracker coloring that gives it its name - on a wiry, branching 12-24 inch clump. It is built for hot, dry, sunny ground where richer-fed bedding plants sulk, blooming hardest exactly when summer heat peaks.

An old garden-favorite annual native to Mexico, grown for showy daisy-like flowers in nearly every color but true blue - red, yellow, orange, pink, rose, lavender, green, and white. Bushy, leafy plants rise on upright, hairy, branching stems and bloom continuously from early summer to frost. A magnet for butterflies and hummingbirds, and one of the most reliable cut-and-come-again cutting-garden flowers.

The iconic cornfield cornflower or bachelor's button - a slender, grey-green hardy annual carrying intense-blue (also pink, white, or purple in cultivars), fringed, thistle-like flowerheads from early to mid summer. POWO (Kew) places it native to southeastern Europe, the Balkans, and the eastern Mediterranean, naturalised across much of the temperate world as a cornfield archaeophyte. Honesty matters here: once a common cereal-field weed, the wild cornflower has DECLINED sharply across northern Europe under modern farming and is a genuine conservation concern there, even as it remains a beloved, easy, self-seeding cottage and meadow annual. Its blue florets are edible - a traditional garnish for salads, cakes, and teas. RHS gives several selections the Award of Garden Merit and rates the species fully hardy (H7). A strong nectar plant for bees and butterflies, it also bears extrafloral nectaries that feed ants and other insects.

A fast, low-maintenance warm-weather annual from Mexico and the southern United States, grown for saucer-shaped, daisy-like flowers (2 to 4 inches across) with red, pink or white rays around a yellow center. The lacy, threadlike bipinnate foliage gives an airy texture, and the long bloom run from early summer to frost makes it a workhorse for cutting and cottage gardens. It flowers best in lean soil - overly rich, fertile ground produces leafy plants with fewer blooms.

The first thing to settle about plains coreopsis is the thing seed racks are vaguest about: it is an ANNUAL. Missouri Botanical Garden types it that way without hedging, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center calls it an annual in its first line, and the plant germinates, flowers, sets seed and dies inside one season. That single fact separates it from the other two coreopsis in this group. Lanceleaf coreopsis and largeflower coreopsis are true perennials that gardeners routinely expect to be long-lived and that are not quite: MBG says lanceleaf needs dividing every two or three years in a border to stay robust; threadleaf coreopsis, already in this catalogue, is the one that genuinely persists. Plains coreopsis persists differently - not as a plant but as a seed bank. It self-sows heavily, and a stand that looks permanent after five years is five generations, not one plant, which is why it is the coreopsis for a meadow sowing and the wrong one for a slot in a border where something has to be there next April. What you get for accepting that is the best flower in the genus for the money. Solitary daisies one to two inches across, seven to nine bright yellow rays each painted maroon at the base around a red-brown disc, carried in quantity on wiry branching stems above finely cut foliage. MBG rates it showy and good for cutting, lists no serious insect or disease problems, and puts its maintenance at low. It is the plant behind most of the yellow in a roadside wildflower mix. Two cautions belong next to that. It self-seeds hard enough that MBG recommends deadheading specifically to prevent it, and it has naturalised across nearly fifty territories outside its home range, from Britain and Poland to Japan, Java and Fiji - so treat spare seed as something to bin rather than scatter. And the two best sources disagree about water: MBG grows it dry to medium and calls it drought tolerant, while the Wildflower Center rates its water use HIGH and says the good years are the wet ones. Both are describing the same plant honestly, and the record below explains why.