The famous blue poppies include three species, some hybrids, and not all blue! The plants we offer should all be perennial (so long as they are not allowed to flower in their first year), slowly increasing to form clumps. From the winter buds at ground level emerge hairy leaves, longer and more pointed in Meconopsis grandis than in M. betonicifolia. The tall stems, each carrying many large poppy flowers, grow rapidly, to start blooming usually in early June, with the show lasting well over a month.

Meconopsis 'Lingholm' (Fertile Blue Group) is one of the strains of blue-flowered hybrids with fertile seed and producing perennial plants. Most cultivated plants called Meconopsis grandis (except those recently introduced from Sikkim) and Meconopsis x sheldonii should now go under this name. It has distinctive rusty brown hairs on the stems and new leaves, and the seed pods are long and narrow, like those of Meconopsis grandis, and unlike the fat ones of Meconopsis betonicifolia.