Chris Grey - WIlson

Chris Grey - Wilson gave an excellent series of talks all day at the November meeting of the Meconopsis Group in Edinburgh.  There are now 75 species going into his new monograph which goes to the printers at the end of this year.  Some species will be difficult to identify unless access can be had to herbarium material and very few places will have this material.

A seperate book is to be published as a multi-authored book on all aspects of cultivation.

This website will concentrate on identification for keen amateurs and will not use standard botanical keys but visual imagery to seperate difficult groups.

News - M. lyrata

Another group that has just been split up including several new species is the M. lyrata group. This is little known in cultivation.  I shall add these as soon as I get time under M. lyrata.

News - Summer 2012

This summer I flowered 6 different seed numbers of M. integrifolia which were all collected wild in China.  Not One of them resembled the deep yellow dwarf upward flowering plants illustrated on this website and taken by Harry Jans at the very north of the range of this species.  None had absolutely consistent 3 veined leaves which is a defing character of this species and a major separation from M. pseudointegrifolia.  None of the flowers was such an intense deep yellow and upright and none had no style with a Papaver like stigma.  None however would have passed as M. pseuodointegrifolia with obvious long styles, pendulous deep flowers of a cream yellow. Clearly there is a cline right through from a deep yellow northern upright plant to a tall cream yellow southern plant.  The upright deep yellow flowers, dwarf stature and stiff 3 veined leaves may be an adaptation to a dry, windy open habitat.  The problem lies with Carl Linneus.  I have often wondered if he really believed all plants were God created ( almost certainly he did not ) and whether he had any understanding that plants might gradually adapt to changing habitats and climate even if he had no inkling of the genetic mechanisms.  It would be much better to recognise super species above the level of genera.This can be seen in the M. horridula group ( 8 or 9 species and growing ).  The integrifolia group are like this, so too M. grandis perhaps and some of the evergreen monocarpics. Others like the red M. punicea are very distinct though there is variation in growth and flowering of even these that differs between collecting sites.

News - Spring 2011

Three new developments. Paul Egan has described 2 new species from Nepal. Meconopsis autumnalis and M. manasluensis ( Papaveraceae ) two new species of Himalayan poppies endemic to Central Nepal with sympatric congeners.

The link is http://www.mapress.com/phytotaxa/content/2011/f/pt00020p056.pdf

Details and images in time on the New Species Pages. Good colour illustrations in the paper.

Yoshida, Sun and Boufford have descibed 2 new species from the Mianning Xian region of Sichuan. These are Meconopsis pulchella, a relative of M. impedita and differing in a number of characteristics and M. heterandera which is very similar to M. rudis and M. racemosa but differs in having unique inflated and inwardly curved inner filamants that are inwardly curved. This is different from the unique filaments in M. henricii and M. sinomaculata. These are well illustrated in the paper which is available online in Acta Botanica Yunnanica 2010 32(6) 503 - 507.  There are good colour illustrations

Finally Chris Grey-Wilson ( and a good general cultural section for all big blue poppies with John Mitchell of the RBGE ) has written in SIBBALDIA 8 ( available on-line ) an account Meconopsis Grandis - The True Himalayan Blue Poppy. This splits M. grandis into 3 new sub-species, M.g. orientalis ( N and NE ( Bhutan,  NW Arunachal Pradesh and in the Cho La and Po La in Tibet )) This is the one we are most familiar with in gardens and includes L and S 600 and Betty's Dream Poppy, M. g. grandis East Nepal - Barun Khola and S and E of Everest as well as the Jongri region of Sikkim. M. g. jumlaensis is a small plant - well isolated from the other subspecies in west Nepal at Ghurchi Lagna in Jumla. These will be added in time to the Meconopsis grandis page but the paper is very well illustrated with good colour images.

News - March 2010

Dr. Chris Grey-Wilson recently talked to the Meconopsis Group at the Royal Botanic gardens at Edinburgh. Dr Grey-Wilson is currently researching and writing a new monograph on the genus. He talked particularly about the group of species related to M. horridula. and described them as an aggregate of species still actively evolving. There are a number of quite clear cut species but many plants that do not fit in. Quite certainly what we grow as M. horridula in gardens is not that species but something much nearer the Chinese species M.pratti though it is clear that it will be called M.horridula by seed merchants and seed lists as that species for some time. The only other species that does grow relatively easily in cultivation is M. rudis - another Chinese species. I will gradually amend this site to take account of the way this story is unfolding. If you want to read further on this, then I shall use the page on this site of M. horridula to expand this.

News - January 2010

I tend to add pictures as the species are submitted to me.  I am not familiar with a number of species and so far have not used herbarium specimens.  Margaret Thorne submitted pictures which we decided were M. sinuata, however, Margaret now thinks these are related to M. lyrata and I tend to agree.  She has consulted the herbarium at RBG Edinburgh on this little known species and this rather confirms the new diagnosis.  The last picture on the M. sinuata page is from Martin Walsh and this does seem to be the genuine thing.  These pages have now been changed.

New Species

The latest Alpine Garden Society Bulletin Vol 77 no. 2 June 2009 has an article by Chris Grey-Wilson re-instating Meconopsis baileyi for the Tibetan form and leaving M. betonicifolia to describe the Chinese species from Yunnan - which was described first. I think most gardeners with a sense of taxonomy would happily accept when confronted by these two species that they were simply consistent variations as occur in many other single Meconopsis species. Grey-Wilson lists 9 differences between the two new species; most of these are on size of various parts. There is some overlap in leaf characteristics but in the seed pod and associated structures where Grey-Wilson describes clear differences these are not clear cut in the Tibetan form so common in gardens and this was the basic conclusion of George Taylor who did see this species in the wild  The Chinese ( M. betonicifolia ) form is apparently readily propagated because it is stoloniferous. Sometimes we forget that the Chinese and Tibetans have a long and sophisticated history and Meconopsis had value both as sources of oil as well as having rather ill-defined medicinal value. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that a good easily propagated plant of value might have been artificially moved and certainly some explanation is required for the disjunct populations. The one feature that is much more critical is that Grey-Wilson says that in Alaska, where both forms are grown together, they do not set seed if cross-fertilised. If this is so then separate species is probably reasonable. However, Meconopsis in cultivation do not always reliably set seed due to factors that are not always clear but of which temperature may be critical. I have had plantings of M. grandis in Caithness for many years and it is only rarely that some forms set viable seed. Last year there was a good set particularly from the KEKE form and the so-called Sikkim form. These plants are immediately adjacent and yet they appear not to cross-pollinate.