Iceland Poppies at Tesselaar: How a Beautiful Plan B Saved a Record-Warm Winter
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Every September, the Tesselaar Tulip Festival in Silvan turns a corner of the Dandenong Ranges into one of the most photographed patches of colour in Victoria. Walking into the fields this year, I found something I wasn't quite expecting: alongside the tulips, whole sections had been given over to Iceland poppies. It turned out to be one of the best things about the 2026 season.
The Warmest Winter Tesselaar Has Ever Seen
Winter 2026 was the warmest on record for Victoria, with the state's average temperature coming in 1.40°C above the long-term average. Melbourne's own figures tell the story just as clearly: a mean winter temperature of 12.18°C narrowly beat the previous record of 12.17°C set in 2013, making it the city's warmest winter since records began in 1855. In the more than seventy years since Cees and Johanna Tesselaar first opened their farm gates to the public in 1954, growers here have never had to work around a winter this mild.
Tulips needed the opposite of what they got. The bulbs rely on a solid stretch of cold soil to trigger proper flowering, and an unusually warm, wet growing season disrupts that process. Tesselaar acknowledged as much on their own website this year, explaining that "following unusually warm and wet conditions during the growing season, a large portion of our tulip crop has been affected," and that this year's flower display was "not what we hoped to present." To reflect the smaller tulip fields, the festival reduced admission prices by 30% for the season.
Plan B: Fields of Iceland Poppies
Rather than let a difficult growing season sink the festival, Tesselaar planted Iceland poppies as a backup. It's a clever substitute: poppies are raised from seed each year rather than relying on a bulb that needs a hard winter chill, so growers can still get a reliable, colourful display even when the tulip crop can't be counted on. Wandering between the two this year, the poppy fields were arguably the highlight — a soft, papery counterpoint to the tulips' structure, glowing beautifully in the morning light.
Iceland Poppies vs. the "Traditional" Red Poppy
It's easy to assume all poppies are the same flower in different colours, but Iceland poppies (Papaver nudicaule) and the red poppy most people picture — the Flanders, corn, or field poppy (Papaver rhoeas) — are quite different plants.
The red poppy is a wild annual of disturbed and cultivated ground across Europe and North Africa, growing upright on wiry, coarsely-haired stems to about 70cm, with large four-petalled red flowers almost always marked with a black blotch at the base. It's the poppy of "In Flanders Fields," worn every Remembrance Day and Anzac Day as a symbol tied directly to the WWI battlefields where it grew.
Iceland poppies come from cooler, sub-polar regions of Europe, Asia and North America (despite the name, they aren't actually native to Iceland), and they grow quite differently: a low clump of blue-green leaves at the base, with slender, leafless stems each rising to hold a single flower. The petals are famously delicate, often described as tissue-paper or crepe-paper thin, and instead of one dominant colour, Iceland poppies come in a soft, wide range — white, cream, yellow, orange, salmon, pink, rose and red. There's no remembrance symbolism attached to them at all; they're grown purely for how beautiful they are.
How the Poppies Saved the Festival
With a smaller tulip display this year, the Iceland poppies gave visitors — and photographers — something worth travelling for. Fields of poppies in that many soft, warm colours, nodding on their thin stems against the backdrop of the Dandenong Ranges, are exactly the kind of moment a spring flower festival needs. It wasn't the season anyone had planned back in autumn, but it was still a genuinely beautiful one, and a good reminder that a garden's plan B can be just as photogenic as its plan A.
The Challenge of Photographing Iceland Poppies
As lovely as they are, Iceland poppies turned out to be one of the harder flowers I've photographed at Tesselaar, for a few reasons.
Their petals are so thin they're almost translucent, which is beautiful with backlighting but unforgiving on exposure — it doesn't take much to blow out a white or pale-yellow bloom completely, especially with the dark centre needing to hold its detail in the same frame.
The stems are wiry and hairy rather than sturdy, so even a light breeze sets the flower heads swaying while the tulips nearby barely move. Anything less than a reasonably fast shutter speed and a crisp edge turns into a soft blur.
The flowers also open and close with light and temperature, staying closed on cool mornings and opening fully once the sun warms them, so timing a shoot for fully-open blooms in soft, flattering light is more of a moving target than it is with tulips, which hold their shape all day.
And because the petals bruise and tear so easily, there's no fixing a damaged bloom in-frame the way you sometimes can with a hardier flower. It's a matter of moving slowly through the field until you find the handful of perfect, untouched flowers.
A Calendar Born From Plan B
I liked the poppies enough this season that I've turned them into their own Personalised Iceland Poppies Wall Calendar, built on the same design as my Tulips Wall Calendar but carrying its own set of poppy photographs from this year's fields. It's a lovely option for anyone who prefers a soft, romantic garden palette over bold colour blocks.
If you'd like more from this year's festival and the flowers of the Dandenong Ranges, don't miss the full story of how tulips travelled from Ottoman gardens to Silvan, a quiet morning among the orchids of Singapore's National Orchid Garden, and a wander through the misty gullies of the Dandenong Ranges themselves.
