Poppies are beautiful wildflowers with large, delicate petals that look like they are made of crinkled tissue paper! They are most famous for being a bright, sunny red color, but poppies can also be orange, yellow, pink, or white. The golden California poppy is the state flower of California.
Poppy flowers open up wide in the sunshine during the day but close up tight at night, almost like they are going to sleep. When the petals fall off, a neat round seed pod is left behind that looks like a tiny pepper shaker with holes on top. The seeds shake out through the holes when the wind blows!
- One single poppy plant can make more than 60,000 tiny seeds!
- People have loved poppies for thousands of years, and farmers in ancient Egypt grew them long, long ago.
- That is why poppies often pop up in places where the ground has been dug up.
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