POWER OF POPPIES
It’s hard to grow the corn poppies of Flanders Field here,
“Wear a poppy. Wear a poppy . . .”
It’s a familiar refrain at this time of year, voiced by polite old gents standing patiently with trays of plastic poppies outside supermarkets. And fortunately, many of us do still drop a few coins into their collecting tins and observe this annual mark of respect.
Kudos, in fact, to those Air Canada flight attendants who demanded the right to pin a poppy on their uniforms, in spite of the strange, meanspirited edict by our national airline forbidding it. (What were the corporate poohbahs thinking, I wonder? That the pins would damage their uniforms? Or, more likely, that the sight would offend somebody? Whatever, knuckles promptly got rapped — and a good thing, too.)
Most people who bother to wear a poppy during the weeks leading up to Nov. 11, do understand its symbolism — that with this gesture, we commemorate the remarkable sight of thousands of blood-red poppies popping up in the barren, battlescarred fields of Northern France after the First World War ended.
In Canada, of course, we also pay tribute to the heart-wrenching poem, “In Flanders Fields,” by Guelph-born surgeon John McCrae, who died in the conflict.
The flower in question is the annual corn poppy, Papaver rhoeas, which self-seeds everywhere and is reportedly as tough as a pair of old army boots. Tests conducted on seeds in Normandy showed that some have survived in hardscrabble soil since Napoleonic times.
Yet here’s the rub: I can never persuade this potent reminder of the horrors of war to settle into my Canadian garden.
I’ve certainly tried. The fall before the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War (which we commemorated in 2014), I scattered some fly-speck seeds of scarlet Papaver rhoeas in a dry, south-facing spot, covering them with barely a smidgen of soil. The following spring, after the snow started melting, I repeated the procedure. What I had in mind was my own mini-Flanders Fields of red popping up, as a tribute to the anniversary.
The result? A big letdown. A few wispy specimens on wonky stringlike stems grudgingly appeared at the end of June. Yet not one of their seeds stuck around to repeat the performance the following year.
This leads me to conclude that, although the Remembrance Day poppy is now familiar around the world, it’s a European anomaly. Far from being prolific, as is often claimed, it will only keep appearing in those extraordinary numbers in the milder, wetter climes of northern France and Belgium.
And that’s too bad. Here’s another rub, too. In this part of North America, the black sheep of the poppy family — Papaver Somniferum, or the opium poppy — is, I’ve discovered, far more co-operative than its much-celebrated cousin.
The proof? A friend gave me an envelope of opium poppy seeds years ago, accompanied by a cheerful warning.
“Don’t tell anyone you’re growing these, will you?” he said, laughing. “It’s illegal in Canada.”
Yikes. I went ahead anyway and sprinkled the seeds of the “baddy” poppy around. And now it’s a fixture where I live, north of Toronto.
Every spring, dozens of its instantly recognizable grey-green seedings now nudge up to the light after winter — in flower beds, my vegetable garden and the gravel next to the greenhouse.
As with all poppy species, the blooms are sensational but last only a couple of days.
Honey bees love my Papaver somniferum. They arrive in dozens from a neighbour’s hives and descend on the delicate purplish pink petals the moment they open, seeming to know that they’d better act fast or miss out on the pollen.
And I’m a fan, like the bees. But part of me wishes I could grow the patriotic corn poppy of Flanders. soniaday.com