The poppy family
Papaveraceae is the great alkaloid family. Almost every member runs colored sap through its tissues loaded with compounds that act powerfully on animals, and one of those compounds changed medicine more than any other plant product in history.
around 42 genera
roughly 800 species
Mostly the northern temperate zone, with a strong showing in dry country
Everything in this guide that belongs to Papaveraceae
A poppy bud is a sealed green case, usually nodding and often bristly. That case is made of two sepals, and it does not open. As the flower matures the sepals are pushed apart and simply drop, so the petals emerge already loose with nothing holding them.
This is why poppy petals look slept in. They have spent the whole bud stage folded into a space several times smaller than their opened area, packed like a parachute, and they never entirely lose the creases. Poppy petals are also among the thinnest of any flower, which is what gives them that translucence when the light is behind them, and it is the same thinness that makes them tear in a breeze.
Count them and there are four, in two pairs, with a mass of stamens underneath and a single ovary in the middle. The nodding bud straightening up is the reliable signal that a poppy is about to open, usually within a day.
Cut almost anything in this family and it bleeds, and the color of what comes out is a good guide to the genus. Poppies run milky white, celandine runs bright orange, and bloodroot runs a startling red that stains skin and was used as a dye and a body paint in North America.
The liquid moves in dedicated channels called laticifers and it is a defense, delivered exactly where a mouth has just done damage. What it carries is alkaloids, and this family carries more of them, and more potent ones, than almost any other.
Opium is the dried latex of one poppy species, scored from the unripe seed capsule by hand and collected the following day. Morphine was pulled out of it in 1804 and was the first alkaloid ever isolated from any plant, named after the Greek god of dreams. Codeine and thebaine came from the same source, and the entire modern class of opioid painkillers descends from work on that molecule. The alkaloids are made in the plant's latex, which is why the seeds are a baking ingredient and the sap is a controlled substance.
The seed capsule is worth looking at properly. In the true poppies it ripens into a dry drum with a flat lid, and just under the rim of that lid a ring of small pores opens. The seeds are not dropped and they are not flung. They sit inside until the stiff dry stem is knocked by wind or by an animal, and then they shake out through the pores a few at a time, exactly like a pepper pot.
It is a patient mechanism and a good one. Seed only leaves when something is moving, which means when there is wind to carry it, and the supply is metered out over weeks instead of being dumped in one place. The capsules dry hard and hold their shape indefinitely, which is why they are sold as dried material long after the flower is a memory.
Bleeding heart is in this family, which surprises nearly everybody. It used to sit in a family of its own alongside the fumitories, and the flowers look nothing alike: flattened, hanging in a row, built on a two-sided plan rather than a radial one. The connection is in the sap, the alkaloids and the way the seeds are built. Corydalis came across in the same move.
The rest of the family is mostly a list of things gardeners chase. The Himalayan blue poppy is one of the few genuinely blue flowers on earth and one of the hardest to keep. The California poppy closes every evening and in dull weather. The Matilija poppy carries a white crepe flower the width of a hand around a yolk of stamens, which has earned it the name of the fried egg plant.