Cherie's Place

Earlier today I came across this passage in the The Morville Hours. It gave me pause for thought, so I thought I would share it with you.

The wearing of scarlet poppies and the laying of poppy wreaths on Remembrance Day dates from 1921, though the sheets of poppies which covered the battlefields of France and Flanders had been remarked on as early as the summer of 1915, the first summer after the war began. An anonymous poem appeared in the pages of Punch for that year which was to be reprinted around the world:

In Flanders fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row…

The old Somerset name for them was ’soldiers’. At the outbreak of World War 1 Britain was still largely and agricultural nation, and poppies in all their frailty, their scattered petals like drops of blood among the harvested corn, must always have been suggestive of spilt blood and sacrifice, the necessity of death for the continuity of life, the duty to remember. For these are not the poppies of oblivion (Papaver somniferum, the source of opium, morphine and heroin), bu Papaver rhoeas, the field poppy, which springs up wherever soil is cultivated or disturbed, each plant producing perhaps a dozen flowers, each flower producing a seed head, each seed head containing thousands of seeds, each seed viable for eighty or a hundred years – waiting for the right conditions to germinate. Like the websites now which enable one to search for the fallen of the two world wars, each site filled with innumerable small facts, each fact inconsiderable in itself, one hardly distinguishable from the next, each biding its time until it is found by the person who seeks it, waiting for the time when it will germinate in the mind, like a poppy seed.

Tags: National Trust, Poppies, Reading, Snowshill Manor, The Morville Hours, WW1, WW11