Author Irina Martynova 
"Blue Dream" of all gardeners - have in your garden flowers of rare colors. If the rose is blue, and if the poppy? There are no blue poppies, you will say, and you will be right until you get to know the wonderful mekonopsis. It grows in the mountains of Tibet and the Himalayas, under the very sky, which is reflected in the sky-blue color of its petals. For true gourmets gardening mekonopsis especially will have to court. It remains to learn the rules of its cultivation, and the dream will become a reality. The "blue poppy" owes its opening to the bravery of the English colonel Bailey, who in 1913 brought his samples home from his business trips to Tibet. The species was named in his honor - M. betonicifolia baileyi, which translates as "Tibetan blue poppy". Subsequently, the famous English botanist Fred Kingdon Ward brought his samples and called them mekonopsis ancestral (M. betonicifolia). And in 1922, the famous alpinist George Mallory, during an attempt to conquer Mount Everest, discovered yet another species of mekonopsis - M. grandis, which was distinguished by the color saturation and the size of the flower. Finding Mallory was the last stroke, allowing the British to finally introduce this "blue miracle" into the culture.