Four crumpled scarlet petals with a black basal blotch, two sepals that drop at opening, and a flat-topped hairless capsule
Common poppy — Papaver rhoeas.
Nature · Wildflowers & flowers
Common poppy
Annual · flowers June to August
Papaver rhoeas — Papaveraceae
The common or corn poppy is the scarlet annual of disturbed arable ground whose seed can lie dormant in the soil for decades and germinate when the earth is broken. That habit made it the flower of the Western Front, and John McCrae's poem In Flanders Fields turned it into the emblem of remembrance worn each November. It is the county flower of both Essex and Norfolk.
How to spot them
- ▸Four large, crumpled, saucer-shaped scarlet petals, usually with a black basal blotch
- ▸Two sepals that fall away as the flower opens; a nodding, bristly bud on a hairy stalk
- ▸A ring of blue-black anthers round a flat-topped, ribbed, hairless seed capsule
- ▸Deeply cut, bristly, pinnate leaves; up to about 80 cm tall
- ▸Cornfields, field margins, road verges and freshly disturbed waste ground, June to August
How to know it
Seed dormant in the soil for decades germinates when ground is broken, which is why it followed the shelling of the Western Front
Common poppy.
John McCrae's poem of 1915 made it the emblem of remembrance
Common poppy — In Flanders Fields, 'In Flanders fields the poppies blow'.
The American teacher Moina Michael and the Frenchwoman Anna Guerin drove the first British appeal for it in 1921
Common poppy — the Royal British Legion's first Poppy Appeal, 1921.
Unlike its opium-bearing relative it yields no morphine, only a mild alkaloid, rhoeadine
Common poppy — Papaver rhoeas, not Papaver somniferum.
County flower of both Essex and Norfolk; traditional names include headache and thunderflower
Common poppy.
Sacred to Demeter and Ceres as a corn flower, and to Morpheus and Hypnos for the sleep of its relatives
Common poppy.
Quick-fire facts
- •Family Papaveraceae; rhoeas is an old Greek name for the plant
- •An archaeophyte in Britain — an ancient introduction that arrived with agriculture
- •A single plant can produce many thousands of seeds, which remain viable in the soil for decades
- •Contains the alkaloid rhoeadine but not morphine; the opium poppy is the separate Papaver somniferum
- •County flower of Essex and of Norfolk in Plantlife's 2002 County Flowers survey
- •The Wildlife Trusts note it has declined with intensive farming and is now often seen in sown wildflower mixes and on verges
- •The 'Flanders poppy' of remembrance is this species; Remembrance Day poppies date from the Royal British Legion's first appeal in 1921
- •Shirley poppies were bred from a white-edged wild plant found by the Reverend William Wilks at Shirley, Croydon, in the 1880s
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- The Wildlife Trusts — Common poppy