This is the Matilija poppy I saw blowing in the wind. One of the few flowers I know the name of. I used to call it a fried egg flower, because it has a yellow yolk in the middle of a large round white. I learned the name Matilija from Sunset Magazine about thirty years ago, and somehow it stuck. It looks pretty much like any other flower, but proportion has a lot to do with it. Each petal on this flower is as big as my fist. When that sinks in, it changes everything. You can see them along the road and focus on each flower as you zoom by. There are two patches of them between San Luis Obispo and Morro Bay. If I road a bicycle, which is well beyond my ability these days, I would have photographed them many times already. But there’s nowhere to stop, no way to step down from the bus. They grow in clumps, where you might see a hundred blooms swaying in the wind, and they grow at the ends of very long stems. It’s a magnificent plant with a stupendous bloom.

Thirty years ago when I was learning the name, I also learned that they were impossible to propagate. They were wild, pure and simple. Trying to grow them in your yard was a waste of time. But this poppy wasn’t growing along the road, it was growing in the garden of St. Timothy’s church. There were two or three blooms and what looked like a hundred more on the way.

Wikipedia tells me that the Matilija is a variety of Romneya, named for Irish astronomer John Thomas Romney Robinson. It also tells me, and this is the first time I've heard it from anyone but myself, that it's sometimes called a "fried egg flower" or "fried egg plant”. So, I wasn’t all that clever.

And a quick look at Google tells me that everyone in the world is now propagating, at least planting and growing, Matilija poppies in their own back yard. Apparently, calling them wild, pure and simple was nothing more than a myth. Maybe nurseries didn’t want people growing them. Maybe they received dangerous messages from outer space. Or maybe someone writing an article on Matilija poppies just had to fill a few more inches and made the whole thing up. And I believed it. The plant is unremarkable, but the myth gave its flower weight. It made each of them seem like an oversized miracle. And perhaps they are.