Fields have been ablaze with wild poppies. They were late coming out after the cold spring, but that harsh weather followed by the summer sunshine triggered masses of poppy flowers. Even so, it's amazing that any poppies could survive after years of being assaulted by herbicide sprays – and that's thanks to the resilience of poppy seeds. Poppies make vast numbers of seeds, up to 60,000 per plant, and these can lie in the ground for over 80 years before germinating, so there is a vast seed bank buried in the country just waiting for the right conditions for them to come back to life.
The common poppy is closely entwined with farming because it thrives in ploughed soil, and probably first appeared here with Stone Age farmers. But it was on the churned-up battlefield of Ypres in 1915, during the First World War, that seas of poppies appeared and inspired John McCrae's poem 'In Flanders Fields', eventually leading to the annual Poppy Day in remembrance.
There is a myth that the common poppy contains morphine and induces sleep. The narcotic is found in the lilac-coloured opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, and, as the name suggests, was a symbol for sleep – morphine was named after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams. The opium poppy is now being grown under licence in parts of southern and eastern England and made into codeine and morphine. But the poppy seeds on loaves of bread are not narcotic and are safe to eat.
