How four friends went into battle and got stroppy about poppies

Flowers are all about love, right? Not when it comes to competitive growing.

Four women I know have got themselves entangled in a contest to grow the best Icelandic poppies. Their children having left home, their maternal appetites have rerouted into a viciously competitive floriculture.

All being well, the poppies will bloom in spring, after a winter’s various methodologies and magics – and then, somehow, these four invested ladies will judge them and choose a winner. OK, go ahead. But raising a flower competitively seems to me to be a kind of interspecies romance during which a bigamist murmurs entreaties at a debutante.

Growing a flower is normally a selfless act, requiring care, gentleness, and patience. The flower is the original lingua franca of love, and there is a brief carnival in the heart of any person who is given one. “No flowers please,” on a funeral notice censors the heart’s finest flourish.

Growing flowers competitively, then, is like plucking angels’ wings to stuff doonas. It’s a sacrilege during which the aesthetic delights of fragility, delicacy, transience, and beauty for its own sake, are hijacked by a lust for gigantism, profusion, gaudiness ... and victory. Nevertheless, these four ladies are hard at it, fertilising, watering, heating, cajoling – each of them a cynical Chloris on a vainglorious mission.

One of the four women is a farmer out west. A respected agronomist, openly admired in the barber shops of Ballarat where the cockies go to yabber and fret. “That Jane goes OK, don’t she,” about sums up their adoration of her. And there’s no higher praise than that in the land of the laconic.

But this year neighbours have noticed her barley is thinner than normal. It might even go as low as four tonnes a hectare – the yield below which the district knows that either the grog has got hold of you or you’re in love. Is she on the grog? In love? No. And No. She’s in the shed toiling away at her vanity project – a tray of poppy seedlings she is hoping will rise up and shame three friends. Her Icelandics are pulsing sap under ultraviolet light, misted hourly with Kosta’s mail-order elixirs while being played Buddhist growth mantras as Jane watches and barracks.

Grower #2, while boasting on the phone of her seedlings to Grower #3, sprayed them from a pump-action bottle she thought was filled with water. It was herbicide. Bedazzled by their potential, she gunned them down with blind love. And this was only her second worst failing as a mother – one of her sons played for Collingwood.

I have a suspicion that she poisoned her poppies