A Timeless History
A weed of the grain field since the first farmers, the corn poppy crossed Europe with the crop. In May 1915 John McCrae, a Canadian doctor at Ypres, saw it growing over fresh graves and wrote In Flanders Fields — fifteen lines. On 11 November 1921 Britain held its first Poppy Day, and the flower has been worn for remembrance every November since.
SourceImperial War Museums — iwm.org.uk · Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew — kew.org
Science In Action
Two sepals — hairy, and they drop off the moment the bud opens, so the open flower has none • No nectar — the poppy offers pollen alone, in vast quantity, and bees come for that • A stigma with no style — a flat disc of rays sits straight on the ovary, and pollen lands on the lid • Pores under the lid — the dry capsule opens a ring of holes and the wind shakes the seed out
SourceRoyal Botanic Gardens, Kew — kew.org · Botanical Society of Britain & Ireland — bsbi.org
Arts
Monet painted a poppy field at Argenteuil, outside Paris, in 1873 and set the red against the green so hard that the picture reads from across a room. He showed it at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874; the woman and child in the grass are probably his wife Camille and their son Jean. It is now in the Musée d'Orsay.
SourceMusée d'Orsay — musee-orsay.fr
Applications Today
It comes up wherever earth has been turned — a roadside, a building site, a freshly ploughed field — so it is now sown on purpose in wildflower mixes for field margins. The garden Shirley poppy, without the black blotch, was bred from a single wild plant found in 1880 in an English vicarage garden at Shirley, Surrey.
SourceRoyal Botanic Gardens, Kew — kew.org · London Gardens Trust — londongardenstrust.org, “Rev. William Wilks”
In 2002 the corn poppy was voted the county flower of Essex, in a national vote run by Plantlife.
In Flanders Fields — facsimile of the autograph poem (title and first stanza cropped) — John McCrae (1872–1918) — written 1915; facsimile printed 1919 — In Flanders Fields and Other Poems, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1919 (scan via Internet Archive / Wikimedia Commons) — Commons file: In Flanders fields and other poems, handwritten.png
