![]() Poppies have been ubiquitous in European war zones since technology gave us the power to destroy landscapes. British troops even noticed it on the ill-fated Gallipoli invasion in it’s native Turkey. He wrote his fateful poem the next day.Īfter Ypres in 1915, the poppy thrived across the Western Front in the springs of 1916, 19. In the churned up mud they bolted to life and by May 2 they were in radiant bloom. McCrae’s case, as the German artillery barrage in April 1915 decimated the Flanders landscape, it also awakened dormant seeds. It’s seeds will only germinate in spring and only in recently disturbed land, which is why it’s a nuisance to farmers when it pops up on freshly tilled fields. Its native to the Easter Mediterranean and, after its brilliant bloom is spent, disperses its seeds into the wind where they can lie dormant for 80 years waiting for ideal conditions.Īmazingly, this poppy grows best in the nightmarish wastelands that industrial warfare creates. Papaver rhoeas, which is also called corn poppy, red poppy, coquelicot, red weed, and corn rose, is so common to Western Europe that it’s considered a weed. What is it about that particular poppy that it was blooming on that fateful day. Plant nerd that I am, I wanted to learn more. “In Flanders Fields” is a poem about hope triumphing over death, just as the poppy literally blooms amidst death. They were specks of life upon a blighted landscape, and they inspired him. McCrae noticed red flowers around his friend’s grave. John McCrae had just experienced one of the first chemical attacks in war’s sad history, when the German army flooded Canadian lines with chlorine gas.Īmidst the incomprehensible devastation around Flanders, Lt. It was the Second Battle of Ypres, and Lt. Blooming in No-Mans’ Land: The Story of the Remembrance Day PoppyĪlmost a century ago, an exhausted Canadian medical officer sat in the back of an ambulance, mourning a friend he buried the day before.
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