Now is the time to enjoy wild poppies looking their best

SOME PEOPLE believe that poppies actually grow around the time of November’s Remembrance Sunday. But the flower everyone is familiar with is, of course, entirely artificial.

England’s are manufactured at a factory in Richmond, southwest London, while Scotland has its own supplier in Edinburgh. Later this year, their combined output of more than 30m poppies and hundreds of thousands of wreaths will be more in evidence than ever with the marking of the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War.

But if you want to see one of the finest display of wild poppies in England, now is the time. They are to be found in a remote southeast corner of the North York Moors National Park. Between the hamlet of Silpho and the beautifully named Whisperdales Beck, not all that far from the bustle of Scarborough, are 25 acres of blazing scarlet fields, part of a conservation initiative called the Cornfields Flowers project.

It aims to revive species of flowers that were common on arable land before the advent of herbicides, by reintroducing them to fields in North and East Yorkshire. In the case of the common poppy (Palaver rhoeas) many farmers had come to view its beauty with an unsentimental attitude. It is, after all, one of the world’s most successful weeds.

Poppies once flowered profusely in cereal crops throughout Britain and the Continent, but now they are more associated with battlefields than cornfields.

Each plant produces about 17,000 seeds which germinate when the soil is disturbed by the plough. In the killing fields of the First World War, however, the land was cratered by artillery shells which, it turned out, created perfect growing opportunities.

Poppies seen flowering among the devastation of Ypres in 1915 are said to have made the land look like it was stained with blood. Their apparent indestructibility was shown right along the Western Front, flourishing between the trenches of opposing armies in the otherwise desolate hell of No Man’s Land. This inspired a Canadian medic, Colonel John McRae, to write the poem In

Flanders Fields with its famous first lines “In Flanders fields the poppies blow, Between the crosses, row on row.” This led to the flower’s adoption by the Royal British Legion as the symbol of fallen heroes and the first buttonhole poppies appeared in 1921, raising £106,000 – roughly equivalent to £5m now. Today the sale of more than 30m poppies in the UK earns £30m for the legion’s charitable work.

Besides those vivid red sheets near Silpho, common poppies are more in evidence on agricultural land than was the case a few decades ago. Their revival began back in the 1980s when the EEC, as it was then, introduced a policy known as Set-aside to undo the damage to farmland caused by intensive agriculture. This work has been continued through Countryside Stewardship schemes, and many farmers allow poppies to flourish around the margins of fields.

For others, though, it is still a fight to stop their spread.