The common poppy, or the wild field poppy, is the most popular of hundreds of species of this plant. It grows as a weed, is pretty useless for household needs and rather decorative: red, white or pink flowers reach a height of 80 cm. However, the opium poppy is a completely different story. It has been used both in medicine and in the food industry — for the production of margarine, for example. Such a poppy reaches a height of more than a meter, but it is now forbidden to grow opium poppies.

In the family of Pavel Petrovich Bazhov, the garden played a very important role. The writer and his family began to prep a plot of land next to the house for a garden in the mid-1920s. Then linden trees, birches, and rowan trees were brought from the Urals as saplings and planted. They stand to this day.

The garden was always taken very seriously, as it was a great resource for their large family. Everyone from young to old took part in gardening. Bazhov had his own approach to agricultural work. His daughter Ariadna recalled:

In the 1930s and 1940s, the Bazhov poppies bloomed almost every summer. Pavel Petrovich loved conversations typical of gardeners: about the harvest, the weather, the difficulties in obtaining seeds and preparing them, and often wrote to his correspondents about his agricultural hobbies:

Bazhov’s warm letters to his eldest grandchildren Vova and Alik have been preserved. He wrote with mild irony about the garden and the pets which the boys knew from living in Sverdlovsk. The letters were also about the poppies.

“The first half of summer was rainy for us. My poppies have grown taller than my height and have now fallen down, it is difficult to get in between the potato beds — the tops are too big. Is it good or bad? What do you think? After all, you are now also homesteading in Peredelkino. So, give me an answer.”