Poppies

Poppies aren’t much of a regular sight here in Florida, so getting to see them is very, very neat to me. Along the front walkway to the BioWorks Butterfly Garden, we have filled a large pot with Lavender and Icelandic Poppies (Papaver nudicaule var. Champagne Bubbles).

These fragrant poppies occur in reds, oranges, pinks, yellows and white. The blooms are large and showy on long stalks, floating above their foliage. The plants are a short lived perennial that reseed readily. This species prefers a well drained soil and don’t need much watering. Although they will only be with us for a short time, we will enjoy every moment of their blooms. As an additional bonus, the butterflies find them tasty.

North American Poppies

In North American there are several native species of poppy including the Western Poppy (Papaver californicum), California poppy (Eschscholzia californica), Yellow Wood Poppy (Stylophorum diphyllum) and Walpole's poppy (Papaver walpolei).

Here in Florida we can find White Prickly Poppy (Argemone albiflora) and yellow Mexican Prickly Poppy (Argemone mexicana). These plants can be found growing along roadsides and even her in our Backwoods Forest Preserve.

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Popular Poppies

In Flanders Field the poppies blow
You may be familiar with the John McCrae poem “In Flanders Field” which speaks of the red Corn Poppies (Papaver rhoeas) common to the grim battlefields of WWI. McCrae penned the three stanzas of the poem shortly after the Second Battle of Ypres in Belgium. Flander’s Field American Cemetery is located in Waregem, Belgium. The popularity of the war poem caused interest in the cause of veterans and led to red poppies becoming a symbol of American veterans.

Poppies, poppies will make them sleep
In the Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West attempts to thwart Dorothy and her band from reaching the Emerald City by setting a broad field of poppies across the road that they must traverse. As the Wicked Witch says “Poppies, poppies will make them sleep.” This referance to poppies and napping is linked to the Opium Poppy (Papaver somniferum). The word ‘somniferum’ derives from the Latin for ‘sleep bringing’. Opium poppies are the source of both the tasty poppy seed of bagel fame and also a latex sap from which opiates are derived. The extracted opiates of this plant have become both medicines and drugs, regulated by laws. The popularity of the effects of the Opium Poppy even led to a series of wars called the Opium Wars that occurred between 1839 and 1860.