The red poppy became a war memorial because it thrives in churned-up ground
The corn poppy loves disturbed soil, so after trench warfare tore up the fields of Flanders in the First World War, it bloomed there in vivid red. A Canadian surgeon put it into verse, and today paper and plastic poppies are pinned on every November to honour those killed in war.
Poppies are herbaceous plants in the subfamily Papaveroideae, some annual and some short-lived perennials that die after flowering. They can stand over a metre tall with blooms up to 15 centimetres across, and wild species carry four or six crumpled petals around a crown of stamens. Bees gather their pollen, which is dark blue in the oriental poppy and grey to dark green in the corn poppy.
The corn poppy, Papaver rhoeas, grew across the Flanders battlefields that John McCrae described in his poem In Flanders Fields. Artificial poppies are now worn around Remembrance Day on 11 November in Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, plastic in Canada and paper in most other places. Americans owe their Memorial Poppy to Moina Michael, a Georgian, and since 1924 veterans have sold Buddy Poppies assembled by disabled ex-servicemen to fund welfare. Canada's 2004 poppy quarter was the world's first coloured circulating coin.
Long before the war, poppies stood for sleep and death. The Greeks and Romans offered them to the dead, tombstones carried them as a sign of eternal rest, and L. Frank Baum's Wonderful Wizard of Oz of 1900 features a poppy field that almost puts the heroes to sleep for good. The link comes from Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy, source of morphine and codeine, which people in Western and Central Europe domesticated between 6000 and 3500 BC.
The flower also has gentler uses. Its oil-rich seeds fill pastries across Central and Eastern Europe, and poppy oil goes into salad dressings, paints and varnishes. The red poppy is the national flower of Poland and an unofficial emblem of Albanians, whose flag shares its red and black, while the golden California poppy is that state's flower.
Source: Poppy
