Poppy

Posted by Suzanne Hill Jan 13, 2007

This past spring, after being in a condo for five years, I moved to a charmingly remodeled two-story house with a small yard. In fact, I moved back to the suburbs where I had sworn I’ve never live again because there was nothing to do and I was tired of taking care of a house myself. I suppose the lack of space in the condo got to me. I’m enjoying being in my “new” house [it’s actually 60 years old], decorating it as I please, planning the space for an art studio upstairs. There’s a new arts center on our tiny Main Street, and the galleries of Baltimore and Washington, D.C. are a mere subway ride away. The peace, the quiet, and the overwhelmingly bright stars overhead at night are all welcome changes from being closer to the city.

The yard had no gardens. The first thing I did to personalize the place was to spruce it up with flowers. Daylilies along the concrete wall. Black-Eyed Susans out front and clematis along the railing. Bergamot and purple coneflower outside the kitchen window. Curly parsley, mint, and chives in clay pots on my patio.

In a neglected patch of grass along the driveway I spread wildflower seeds. I had no idea what to expect; in fact the package warned there would be no blooms until the second year. To my delight, yellow, pink, and white daisies came out. Blue chicory blossomed. Though I was tempted to pluck them as weeds, huge plants spattered with orange daisies sprang up. But the highlight of this perennial garden was by far the red poppy. I couldn’t pick a bunch to bring inside; their delicate papery petals fell off within a day or two. But they bloomed profusely, their vibrant crimson color popping out everywhere.

The delicate crimson poppy, known as the Flanders poppy, is not the sleep-inducing opium poppy. It is in fact a weed. This poppy covers the fields of the region of Flanders in Europe, which was a war zone of World War I. It is said that the ground was drenched in blood. The fields of red flowers became known as a sad symbol of the fighting and the sacrifice of the soldiers.