I have been trying for many years to grow poppies. This year they did well. What do I do with them now that they have stopped blooming?

T.H., New Hartford. Dear T.H.: Perennial or Oriental poppies grow vigorously once they have settled in to a suitable spot with moist, well drained soil and plenty of sunshine. The very showy flowers.

A patch in full bloom is visible from a few hundred feet away -- can be orange, pink, red, white or purple. The flowers only last a few days, but the seed pods are also attractive, so they prolong the season of interest for a couple of weeks. After that, the bristly foliage quickly deteriorates.

Oriental poppies are summer dormant. Relatively few plants that are grown in Central New York behave this way. It can be disconcerting to have a plant that was gorgeous rapidly turn yellow, then dry up and wither in early summer. The plants aren't dead. Cut the foliage back to the ground. A new rosette of leaves will appear sooner or later and the plant will bloom again next year right on schedule.

Old fashioned bleeding hearts, Italian arum, some columbines and all the native spring ephemerals such trilliums, bloodroots, shooting stars and mayapples are treated the same way. So are spring flowering bulbs, for that matter.
 When the foliage dies back there is a gap in the bed. Ornamental grasses, Japanese anemones, chrysanthemums and other late bloomers planted nearby will fill the hole. Another trick is to plant perennials in long skinny drifts, as favored by the notable English garden designer Gertrude Jekyll, instead of in large blobs. Jekyll advised cutting back the poppies, then pulling the foliage of adjacent plants over the empty space. Plants with long arching or trailing stems like hardy geraniums or perennial sweet peas work well.

Annual poppies go to seed and then die. If you want the plants to reseed themselves, wait until the seed pods ripen, then scatter the seed around or save it. If you will plant purchased seed next year, pull the plants up when flowering has finished. Poppies are tap-rooted and don't transplant well.

Oriental poppies, the perennial kind, don't transplant especially well either. They can be propagated by root divisions when the foliage is dormant, now. Dig up a few pencil thick roots from the outside of the clump. Cut the roots into pieces 3-6 inches long. The convention is to cut the end that was closest to the root ball straight across and the end that was further from the root ball at an angle.

Plant the cuttings horizontally about an inch deep in flats in well drained potting mix or sand. Don't overwater them, but don't let them dry out either. Check them in a month or so to see how they're doing. You can pot them up individually for the winter or plant them out in the fall.