What do you think this plant is?

[Calmasasleepycat]

This is flourishing in a sunny spot of the garden. Is it a weed do you think? I’ve tried googling and it does look a little like poppy leaves, but perhaps too large? The leaves have soft prickles on the outside of the central stalk. No signs of any flowers. Those are flag irises in the second photo, for scale. If it’s a weed I need to pull it out before it gets any bigger!

Looks like a poppy to me. Probably an Oriental poppy if the leaves are fuzzy.

Poppies

Yes, perennial poppies.

Thank you all! I shall leave them and hope for a nice show of flowers. Will post photos if they’re good. 😊

And hopefully not cardoons

Omg, I’ve just googled cardoon (had never heard of them before)! Fingers crossed it’s not that, as it would be far too big for that space. The leaves seem to be much more divided than mine, though.

Thistle ,sorry.

I have a cardoon in a bed at the front of the house. It is beautiful when it flower and the bees love it. It grew over 5ft last year and had about 15 heads of flowers.

Definitely Poppy

Poppies.

Thank you for the responses! I think a bird must have flown over and dropped a whole poppy seed head there, as the seedlings are completely crowded. I shall just leave it and see what happens. (As soon as there is any sign of a thistle I shall pull it all out!).

I’m back again! I thought I would just update this thread with another photo. As you can, I now have flowers and lots of buds, so more to come. They are 4’6” high! I will need to keep deadheading to keep them going.

So it was a poppy :-) (It definitely wasn't the right leaves for a thistle or cardoon). I don't think you need dead head poppies. They have a succession of short lived flowers (soem species only 1 day) so the presence of developing seed heads doesn't inhibit new flowers. And the seed pods are quite decorative in their own right.

They’re lovely I have one of these as well. I defo wouldn’t dead head-hopefully it’ll self seed for next year.

Thank you! That’s a job saved, then. No deadheading!

Opium poppies. Scatter the seed they'll look, beautiful next year.