A really lovely form of Meconopsis betonicifolia from my daughter's garden in Invergowrie, Tayside. A seedling of mine from my own seed.

Nomocharis are to my mind some of the most beautiful of all bulbous plants. They grow well in the slightly humid conditions that suite Meconopsis on this dry side of  Scotland ( though this year it never stops raining!) and if slugs are kept deterred they increase in size and reliably set seed. Difficult to put a species name to this as it is probably hybrid - but all are beautiful.

This is actually a rather nice deep blue with little in the way of purple. It is a part of the 'horridula' group with spiny buds and foliage. There are lovely silver blues as well as white. It is I suppose now technically M. racemosa but this 'super species' shows great variation. A great advantage of these is that they are really tough plants flowering at 2 (usually) or 3 years old and would grow pretty well even in hot dry sites south of the Scottish border. It is winter dormant with resting buds below the soil surface. Seed from seed exchanges may well of course have some of the less desirable forms with coarse spiny foliage and a flower colour and spots on the leaves of purple. If you have a good colour it will probably breed true. 

Meconopsis napaulensis now produces a wide range of colours and forms with much variation in the foliage. They are clearly somewhat hybrid. This is a very soft cream with a plain green stigma. After a few years as an increasingly large evergreen rosette they eventually throw a tall flowering spike at the back of the border. They will die after this but usually sets lots of seed, 

Meconopsis x beamishii. This ia a hybrid between a form of M. grandis and either M. integrifolia or M. pseudointegrifolia. The blue/ yellow crosses always seem to be this same creamy white. It will hopefully be perennial but only a proportion are. The cross with the yellow species and M. betonicifolia is M. x sarsonsii. The leaves of the hybrids usually more closely resemble the blue parent and this is how the two can be told apart.

Trilliums very much a group of plants that are happy growing with meconopsis. This is a lovely double form. They only increase slowly but eventually they will split. This is Trillium grandiflorum Flore Plenum.

Meconopsis Lingholm. Probably repeating myself but if you aspire to blue poppies in the garden this is the one. It was originally found in a Lake district garden (Cumbria). It is derived from the old sterile hybrid  M. x sheldonii. This was a cross between M. betonicifolia and M. grandis and these were sterile.  By  chance a part of one of these plants became tetraploid and now there were two sets of chromosomes from each parent and normal division could take place and plant became fertile and produces masses of seed since they are vigorous plants and very long lived. I found a similar fertile pod on a M. x sheldonii many years ago in my garden and this too produced a rather smaller and perhaps less effective perennial fertile plant called I called Kingsbarns x hybrids after where I live in East Fife.