What can anybody tell me about Plume Poppy

I just got one of these because I fell in love with the leaves and used a leaf in a cement leaf workshop. Naturally, I didn't research it before I bought it & found out it is extremely invasive, so I planted it not near the house but in an abandoned vegetable garden down the hill from our house. Was interested to find out if anybody grows this plant & how do you keep it from spreading. Thanks. Buttonneer

I've read that it spreads by underground rhizomes and by the seed. Cutting off seed heads would help some, but it won't do anything for the underground rhizomes. I've never grown it, I'm just going by what I've read. Hopefully somebody who has grown it can help you better.

Thanks so much.

You got a plant? I tried from seed once, got one small, spindly plant that just hung on for a year, but did manage to sprout up again the next, surprisingly. May have pulled it then, or maybe it didn't make it, so it couldn't outcompete forsythia roots and my normal flowerbed thugs.
Here's plantfiles on it: http://davesgarden.com/pf/go/962/


This message was edited Jun 21, 2007 7:49 AM

buttoner,
I have a plume poppy that is 2 yeas old , my neighbor ( who thinks everything is a conspiricy (sp ) a glass is half empty and someone has delibratly poked a hole in it kind of gal ) told me to get rid of it it was going to be too invasive . I ignored her and this year you can see that it is spreading about a 4 foot circle around the mother plant has babies coming up but they are easily pulled out I think it sure like to have some elbow room but I love the foliage the leaves are so unusually shaped and it is really a magnificent plant . It sounds like you have it in an out of the way place that won't matter if it grows to much . I love mine
laura

Hey Buttoneer, this one is a toughie because it does reproduce both sexually and asexually and is a documented invasive species which means it has escaped from many gardens. Just a thought but maybe you might want to re-plant this one in tight up near your home. I did the same thing as you a while ago with a few plants that made me nervous. I planted them far away by my wetlands to avoid having to weed as much in the few nice flower beds I had around the house. Thought being that the wetlands and our lawn would contain them. My problem is that I never made it over to where the plants were to deadhead the Malva moschata and I never quite paid attention to what the Iris japonica was doing and within three years, I had Malva everywhere and the Japanese Running Iris had definitely run. Big mess. Considerably bigger mess by the third year than what I could have ever imagined. I now keep the Japanese Iris confined to small pots and grow them in water features. There they are truly confined and I lop off what ever grows beyond the pot. The Malva I stuck in an area bordered by concrete sidewalks that is in a windbreak. I have to walk by that Malva every day so I can easily hand pull offspring and catch the parent plants before they go to seed but I am going to remove that because it's still creating way too much work for me. I had planted that M. moschata alba for moths but it's ending up being to much work so I'm going to need to find a replacement that is better behaved.

Thanks for the helpful hints on the plume poppy but my DH tells me, "don't you DARE plant this beast near the house. We are going to put wettened cardboard down around the plant & black plastic over that & peg it down to the ground. I will deadhead it. That should help keep things under control. I used one of it's leaves for a cement leaf workshop & it turned out just astonishingly neat. I can see the plant over the hill and will go down every other night until it is planted in.

Ohhhhh, can you post a photo of the finished product from you cement leaf workshop?

Sure nuff. Be so glad to. Do you want a pix of the item before or after it is painted?

Both please if you don't mind. What are you painting and sealing yours with? Will you be able to use it outside year round when you are done?

Just out of curiosity, do you think there is a way to use this technique to create faux mushrooms of some sort?

cement leaf workshop? this sounds interesting I would love to see pic's too
laura

Ok, when I get some spare time this weekend, I'll include the link to the workshop I participated in, but you can see it at Hypertufa Troughs forums. I painted mine with acrylic paint (in the little bottles) and sealed it with Krylon. I have left them out all year with no problems.

I'm really excited to see your photos. I'm getting together with two girlfriends next week and we're going to try out first project. I just love it when the blind lead the blind but we'll have fun trying.

Here is the link:
http://davesgarden.com/forums/t/533171/

thanks for the link- that is very interesting. I just want to drop all my (OK, one) housecleaning plan and go get mortar and leaves!

Oh dear, your family is going to get angry with me for taking you away from your housework. Housework can be done anytime. the leaves take precedance. Ho Ho Ho.
BTW. we used portland cement for the leaves this time. Much smoother finish.

Say, what kind of peat did you use in your mix? I've got portland cement here as well as 6 bags of perlite so all I need to do is pick up peat. I went to go buy some and there were several different kinds available. Can we use the cheapest?

I was recently on a garden walk with a friend. In one of the homes back yards were stepping stones. We of course inquired about them because they were so unique. They were made out of quickcrete, after the guy made a form of course, and the leaf he used was from rhubarb.

I have a form for Trillium but I haven't quite figured out how to get what I pour into the form to release. I think I need to find the hypertufa forum here because all I could think of to do was to spray it with Pam or grease it with vegetable oil.

I found the forum under the Home Talk tab-
http://davesgarden.com/place/f/hypertufa/all/

We used 3 parts sand to 2 parts portland cement. Mixed the dry ingredients in a wheelbarrow. Then mixed 1.5 cups bonding agent to 1 gallon water & slowly added to the mix while someone is stirring with a cement hoe. When the consistency got like slightly stiff oatmeal, it was ready to use. Here is a pix of the plume poppy leaf real & cement that I used.

Another pix of the cement plume poppy leaf.

Beautiful! What's a bonding agent?

It's a liquid you can get at Lowes or Home Depot that helps bind the cement & sand together. It also privides strength. Now I hope all you good people have a better impression plume poppy. It definitely has the most beautiful leaves for the cement leaf workshop & I have used wild grape leaves, hosta, water lily, etc and it is the best looking leaf as seen above.

Do you have a brand name or will the people who work there know what I want?

I'll have to take a pass on growing Plume Poppy but you still have me really pumped and looking forward to tomorrow when my girlfriend comes over to play.

Those cement leaves are really gorgeous, I may have to try some myself! I've got a nice Fatsia japonica that would have perfect leaves for this! Are the cement leaves strong enough that you could use them for stepping stones through the garden, or are they really more decorative? They wouldn't get a ton of wear and tear, it's not a major path or anything, just an access point for weeding & watering.

I have never used them for stepping stones, but if you used chicken wire inside (sandwiched in between two 1/2 inch layers of concrete, I don't see why not. Fatsia would be great. I have one, myself. The people at Home Depot will know what you want. I believe it's called an acrylic bonding agent. It's a white liquid. The sales people should know what it is. Just tell them it's used to fortify cement & also to help the cement stick to a dissimilar medium such as sand.

Hello all,

I bought a Plume Poppy just this spring, and it seems to be sitting there
going nowhere. I'll check back next year to let you know what becomes of it.

Love the leaves and the cement castings. That is the first thing I thought of
when I saw mine taking form.

:-) KM

I hope you don't have it too close to your house. From what I understand, the plant produces large quantities of seeds, and also grows from underground rhizomes, so you have plants popping up all over. I planted mine down at the bottom of the hill on which we live. We have an abandoned vegetable garden (getting too old for a veggie garden) and I planted it up at the top of the garden and it slopes down, so the plant will have plenty of room to spread when it decides to.

Hi Button,

Actually, I do, but we like the jungle look, LOL. There are things
growing here that others would cringe over. I'd rather pull up the
extras than wait years for an area to fill in.

:-)

Amen. And that Plume poppy makes the best-looking leaves, too.

*sigh*

I just keep looking with admiration at your casting. That is
so neat how you show the comparison to the real leaf.

Neato!

Thank you. Now you have to get up & make some. They are sooooo cool and look great in the garden. I am going to paint mine and will post pix after they are painted. I will probably update the original thread with the pix, too.

From experience: once you have plume poppy in your garden, you'll never be without it. It actually is an extraordinarily neat plant, but deadheading a seven foot tall plant is iffy. If I had it to do over, I guess I would pass on it.

Don't worry. It isn't anywhere near the house. It's in our abandoned veggie garden at the bottom of the hill from our house.

This is just a different perspective on plants that can be questionable but if I buy one that is "iffie", I plant it up in tight around my house to be able to keep a better eye on it. That way if it tries to take off for a neighbor's property or a natural area I've got a better chance of being able to nip it in the bud right away without creating hard feelings or a lot of unnecessary work for myself later on down the road. For me, I can generally determine whether a plant is going to try to escape my property or not by the 3rd year it is in the ground but pretty much always by the 4th.

I'm not worried. My husband is "the roundup man."

Can you please send your husband and his bottle of happy juice my way for a few weeks ;)

Totally off topic again but Buttoneer- we made three birdbaths using leaves that were sprayed with Pam. YOU got me psyched to actually get going to try these tufa projects. One birdbath has a Sensitive Fern design, one has a Bur Oak design, and one has a White Oak design. I can't wait to see how they turned out. They're submersed in water curing in a kiddie pool right now. I forgot how long they need to be in water but I think it was like two weeks. Two of the birdbaths we will keep to use around here by wedging them into dead Buckthorn skeletons for the birds and one is for a friend to use for her birds. Next project will be to try making planters sporting a motif of sprigs of Pine. Then stepping stones using the forms with the Trillium design I was given as a gift a while ago and then a Gunnera leaf project. I checked my neighbor's Gunnera plants last week sometime and the leaves weren't quite big enough yet or else we'd go for the Gunnera leaf project first.

I found a really interesting leaf that is HUGE, it has to be the size of a dinner plate if not larger. Don't quite know what to do with it yet because it is a bowl shape on the plant but here's a pic-

Oh, that's a nice one. You can mound sand, then put plastic over the wet sand, put the leaf vein side up on the plastic-covered sand, put your cement over the leaf & you've got a little bowl. What type of mix do you use for your leaves? Would love to see some pix.

I can't get pics for you until I get back home. I haven't even seen what they look like yet because we left the same day we made them. A friend came over and wet down the towels under the plastic then moved them to the kiddie pool on the second day. I think we did have the vein side toward the birdbath. Oopsie on the plastic wrap. We didn't use plastic over the leaves we put down to use as an imprint. Here's hoping they have some sort of a design in them otherwise they'll be plain old irregular shaped birdbaths.

I posted some photos somewhere of what we did and the mix we used. Can't remember where I put those photos I took the day we made the birdbaths. Time to go on a hunt through DG.