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Some simple guidelines to help you carry out your Poppy Survey

When should you survey?


Survey any time during June to September when you see plants flowering in your area.

Where can you find poppies?

Poppies are typically found in two types of habitat. Most frequently they are found in arable fields, usually where crops of wheat, barley or oats are being grown. They can grow across the whole field or be confined to its margins or gateways. Poppies can also be found on any disturbed ground, such as in gardens, on roadsides and along railways, on waste ground and collapsed banks, and beside rubbish tips. All poppies prefer light, well-drained calcareous (lime-rich) soils.

You may want to draw a sketch map of the site and the location of the poppies for your own record – this would allow you to re-visit the site in future years and see how the plants move around the habitat and how the population is faring.

PLEASE NOTE! NEVER enter onto private land without the landowner’s permission! If you see poppies in a farmer’s field, you MUST ASK PERMISSION first before entering the field. Try asking at a local farmhouse or village shop to find the owner and explain what you would like to do and why. If permission is refused, accept this politely and do not enter the field.

How do you record a grid reference?

On the survey form we ask you to give the grid reference of the location you have surveyed. It is extremely important that you provide this information as without it we cannot use your records! eg. TQ793740

If you have access to the web you can retrieve the grid reference for your location by visiting the Ordnance Survey website (www.ordsvy.gov.uk) and following the “Get-a-Map” link at the bottom-right of the home page. You can either search for a location with a place name or postcode, or zoom repeatedly into the main map until you get down to your site.

By placing the cross-hair cursor over your site you can read off its six-figure grid reference in the bottom-left corner of the window. Alternatively you can phone the Plantlife helpline 01722 342756 or e-mail poppy@plantlife.org.uk for further guidance.

How should you record the poppies you find?

Use the illustrations and descriptions provided here to decide which type of poppy is growing at your site.
  1. Record at any sites where the plants grow. If the plants are in a field, please record each field as a separate site. If they are not in a field, record each habitat as a single site (so a roadside will be one site and a rubbish tip another).
  2. If you record more than one poppy species at a site please complete a separate record on the survey form for each species.
  3. You can record up to three sites on the attached survey form. If you want to record more sites than this, please either ring 01722 342755 or email poppy@plantlife.org.uk for more forms, photocopy your original form, or enter your extra information directly onto our website www.plantlife.org.uk.

    4. If your site is a field with a crop, please record both the following:
  4. The distribution of poppies within the whole field. Are they growing throughout the entire field, confined to one or more distinct strips or headlands (field margins), or only found in the gateway?


  5. The abundance of the poppies within the area they occur. They may be extremely dense, forming an almost continuous carpet of colour (Fig 1.1.a). Alternatively, they may be scattered, being more widely spaced but sometimes forming distinct patches within the area (Fig 1.1b). Finally, they may be sparse, with just a few plants occurring here and there (Fig 1.1. c).

Figure 1.1 Describing the density of a poppy population. Here each blue dot represents a flowering stem.

If the poppies are not growing in a field, please describe the abundance within that habitat as described in number 5 above.

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