Dainty and vulnerable ...but poppy is the most enduring of tributes

MOWING has been minimal in the grounds of a recently completed campus at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital. As a result, much of it this high summer is a rather wonderful wildflower meadow.

There are bobbing buttercups, serene foxgloves, red and white clover and nodding ox-eye daisies. The wood forget-me-not is just starting to fade but, most of all, there are poppies – and I have never before seen them in such numbers.

There are, of course, many commercial strains of ‘super poppies’ you can plant in your garden. They are so-called because they stay in bloom for weeks.

But the true, wild poppy of our traditional cornfields, Papaver rhoeas, will take seed and grow only in ground that has been recently disturbed. It is a f l o w e r o f b r e a t h t a k i n g f r a g i l i t y, frequently blooming (and dying) in the course of a single day.

‘But pleasures are like poppies spread, you seize the flower, its bloom is shed,’ harangues the pompous narrator in Robert Burns’s Tam O’Shanter.

Few blooms have been so resonant with symbolism, in so many cultures, for so long as this frail countryside thing. Its blood-red colour has been instinctively associated, and for millennia, with passion and fertility. The Ancient Greeks and Persians associated it with love.

The Romans thought it sacred to Ceres, goddess of agriculture. The Egyptians hung garlands of them in hopes of a good harvest. In the fey Language of Flowers, the poppy stands for consolation.

Given the narcotic properties of its seeds (the true opium poppy, fortunately, does not care for our climate) the blossom is also associated with slumber, as Iago baits Othello: ‘Look, where he comes. Not poppy nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep which thou owedst yesterday...’

In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a magical field briefly threatens to make Dorothy and her protagonists doze for ever. But to most of us, of course, the poppy is a symbol of remembrance for the fallen in battle.

IT is not universal – Germans, after the Great War, sported forget-me-nots – and it was not, in fact, a British idea. The association was first made by Canadian physician and war poet John McCrae, said to have penned the powerful In Flanders Fields after witnessing the death of a mate at 2nd Ypres in May 1915.

McCrae himself was felled in January 1918, not by a bullet but by pneumonia. But his poem was published (in Punch) late in 1915 and quickly became one of the most popular of the First World War – not least as it is, in fact, a call to arms, not one of those sickly war-is-futile numbers since inculcated by countless English teachers.

Poppies did indeed grow, and in vast number, on those terrible killing fields.

In November 1918, US academic Moina Michael appeared at a YMCA Overseas War Secretaries conference wearing a silk poppy and distributed more to those attending.

In 1919, a formidable but good-hearted French matron, Madame Guérin, began holding Poppy Days to raise funds for widows and orphans and maimed veterans. By 1921, the

poppy had been adopted throughout the Englishspeaking world.

Their popularity in America has declined, but poppies are worn to this day in the Queen’s realms and territories, in tribute to all who have served and fallen in all our conflicts since the fight against the Kaiser.

Our friends in Australia and New Zealand actually don it twice a year – around November, recalling the Armistice, but also on Anzac Day, April 25, in bitter recollection of their countrymen slain at Gallipoli. And, of course, wreaths of poppies are laid at war memorials the breadth of the land on or near Remembrance Sunday.

In Britain, we have two different styles of poppy sold by two different organisations – The Earl Haig Fund Scotland and the Royal British Legion everywhere else.

Our Scots poppy is, I feel, neater and more affecting than the elaborate version – complete with green leaf – sported elsewhere. Even the way it is distributed is very Scottish.

In England, poppies are sold by vendors – often veterans – in the street. Here, mostly, we have a shyer honesty box system, at supermarket tills and so on.

All Scottish proceeds go to the support of veterans and their dependants: elsewhere, those serving today in the Armed Forces also benefit.

There have been subtle changes. Till well after the Second World War, you wore a poppy only on Remembrance Day itself and, until 1994, the centre of a Scottish poppy was stamped Haig Fund. It has since read Poppy Appeal, perhaps in consequence of Haig’s demonisation by the likes of Blackadder Goes Forth.

FOR more than three decades from about 1979, Scots poppies were attached by pin. They have now reverted to that footery green plastic stem, unfortunately, because it is cheaper to make.

Annually, 40 ex-servicemen at Lady Haig’s Poppy Factory in Edinburgh make some five million poppies and 12,000 wreaths for the Scottish Poppy Appeal. In 2017, it raised an impressive £47million, supplemented by the sale of poppy badges and jewellery.

Last year, to wide appreciation in my own Western Isles community, Poppy Scotland struck a special pin to mark the centenary of the frightful Iolaire disaster at the mouth of Stornoway Harbour on January 1, 1919. More than 200 drowned, most Great War

naval ratings, in what remains Britain’s worst peacetime disaster at sea since the Titanic.

They sold out within 24 hours and a New Year’s Day ceremony overlooking the malignant rocks, attended by Prince Charles and Nicola Sturgeon, was the last act in Scotland’s Great War commemorations.

Most of us, I think, disdain the flashy poppy jewellery sported by judges on The X Factor and the like, come November, and it is hard to view the white poppy (proffered by the Peace Pledge Union) or the black poppy (handed out by the Stop The War Coalition in honour of Great War conscientious objectors) with any respect.

The decision not to wear a poppy at all is a different matter. Many war veterans actively disliked it.

Some newsreaders, such as Channel 4’s Jon Snow, refuse to wear one on air, decrying what he perhaps unwisely called ‘poppy fascism’. Our national football sides, each November, have tussles with FIFA, which forbids the display of ‘political or religious symbols’ on the pitch.

But the wild poppy, dainty, vulnerable, aflutter in the broken ground of what is always an uncertain Scottish summer, is in itself perhaps the most resonant remembrance of all.