Poppies

Bill Meek looks at the history and heritage of this significant floral symbol found around farmland.

Because of its blood-red flowers and tendency to appear wherever earth is disturbed, the poppy has always been a potent symbol of remembrance, fertility and death. This goes back at least as far as the Egyptians, millennia before John McCrae wrote his poem ‘In Flanders Fields’, and the Royal British Legion adopted the poppy for its annual autumn appeal.

Apart from its show-stopping colour, our common field poppy is also an unrivalled opportunist – it appears wherever ground has been tilled, and has done so since the very beginnings of agriculture.

Even the ‘cleaning up’ of the farmed countryside since World War II has failed to eliminate it completely from farmland, as happened with so many other colourful weeds such as cornflower and corncockle.
Poppies are now so ubiquitous that no-one really knows where they started out. They are aliens, but ancient and valued – classic ‘archaeophyte’.

Red is an extremely unusual colour for a British wild flower. Traditional hay meadows, ancient woodlands and grassy waysides will contain plenty of blue, purple-pink, yellow and white flowers, but not so many red blooms.

The reason is simple – flowers have evolved in response to pollinating insects, not human aesthetics, and the vast majority of insects cannot see red. But we only have to watch a clump of poppies for a few minutes on a sunny day to see that they are visited by bees.

This is because their flowers reflect strongly in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum, which insects can see but we cannot. To a bee, a flower which was just red, without ultraviolet, would appear black.

Five species
There are actually not one but five species of wild red poppy in Lincolnshire. The rarest two, rough and prickly poppies, are decreasing weeds of arable land; they have smaller, non-overlapping petals, and the colour of the former may tend towards crimson or pink. These two differ from other poppies in having seedpods spiky or bristly.

The abundant plant of our Lincolnshire cornfields is the common poppy (Papaver rhoeas).

The last two of the five never infest cereal fields like the common sort, but are nevertheless regular inhabitants of Lincolnshire’s roadsides and waste places.

The first is the Long-headed Poppy, whose seed heads are tall and thin rather than short and plump. If you see one, snip through a fresh flower stalk and latex will ooze out; if it turns immediately bright yellow on contact with air, you have the last of the five, the less common and much more exacting Yellow-juiced Poppy.

We should also mention that ornamental red poppies may sometimes find their way into the wild. Oriental and Atlas Poppies are perennials and may stray from gardens, although the latter usually has flowers more orange than red.

Finally, the annual Opium Poppy can have cultivars with red flowers, and may pop up on waste ground, where the strongly whitish-green foliage should distinguish it. This is the same species as the lilac-flowered poppies sometimes grown as a crop in Lincolnshire fields for morphine production, and is also the origin of poppy seeds used in baking.

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