SPRING REPORT WEEK #13.1

Stories around spring’s red wildflower

Poppies have tight links to the aftermath of World War 1 and are closely related to another species relevant to history and modern pharma.

Do you know what’s all that red in this forest?

It’s this flower, but by the hundreds:

That’s Papaver rhoeas, commonly known as poppy or coquelicot in French.

This plant is related to Papaver somniferum, from which Opium and also some chemicals of clinical use derive:

A link to history

The plant thrives in disturbed lands, i.e. where soil has been moved. In fact, I shot my best photographs of the flower in such types of soils. Around here, the most common place to find such soil (and hence poppies) is at construction sites, especially around new buildings and next to roads and bridges that have just been (re)built. Also in crop fields that aren’t planted, or after removing the very early crops of the year, such as rapeseeds. It is in fact quite common for poppies to pop up after rapeseed is harvested, as I showed in two shots of the same place just 1 month apart:

But much more interesting, it turns out that soil is very much moved also in battlefields, especially at trench warfares. So history tells that during World War I trenches were fully covered in poppies. Although the flowers already dominated the landscapes around the battlefields, they concentrated right at the trenches, because the soil was disturbed.

That’s why this flower, and not another, became the symbol of the remembrance day. You can get to know more about this, firsthand from a reporter/historian, in this nice video that includes some footage from the times of the war. It is black-and-white so you don’t see the reds, but you do get to see how densely the trenches are covered!

A powerful Red — Green contrast

The red flowers contrast stunningly against the green background…

That’s because red and green are complementary colors!

Do you think mother nature design this?

I devoted a specific article to this, taking precisely poppies as an example:

Very interesting flower, don’t you think?

Here I compare one of them to a red rose. The latter is more delicate in its shape, but the colors are both stunning, aren’t they?

Here are some of my other “Spring Reports”

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