The role of the poppies

Poppies will continue to grow while other plants in the vicinity have died. Poppie seeds can lay in the ground and only start to grow after other plants and bushes have long gone, for example when the soil has been dug and contaminated. Often poppies may be observed at places where demolition rubble was left in the ground.

Of course the ground around the trenches in the Great War was thouroughly “dug up” and contaminated by the heavy battle and bombardments. Without a doubt, McCrae must have seen hundreds of blooming poppies when he wrote the poem “In Flanders Fields” in 1915.

But the poppy has another meaning in “In Flanders Fields”. Some poppies, those counted to the papaver somniferum, are used to produce opium and morfine; morfine is a strong anaesthetic that was used on a large scale to alleviate the pain of wounded soldiers – sometimes for eternity. The last verses We shall not sleep, though poppies grow / In Flanders fields suggest the narcotic effect of morfine.

Besides that, the appearance of the flower is filled with symbolism: not only are the leaves red as the blood of the fallen and is the inner black, the colour of mourning, but the heart also shows a cross shape, the ultimate Christian symbol of suffering and redemption