S. Worthen | Weblog

Also, real poppies are not in season in November, and even if they were, they tend to droop and drop their petals almost as soon as they are picked.

More frivolously, I wonder about the narcotic perils of large nos of poppies in enclosed spaces!

A day later, and you are the only person who's answered questions 2 and 3. This wouldn't usually be so noteworthy but for question 1 attracting so many replies. Thank you especially much for being helpful.

I hadn't realized the poppies were that big there. If they are - and if poppies were usable as sensible decoration and didn't wilt so far - why not make something bigger than a pin out of them? Poppy hats? Proclaim your support for veterans with a large and stylish hat. The broad-brimmed ones can use small pieces of oasis to keep poppies blooming for at least an extra hour before they wilt.

(Obviously this is only a solution for warmer climates, where the chill snaps of November will not auto-wilt the already highly wiltable poppy. If poppies were in season now.)

I'd expect most Brits to understand what the phrase "Poppy Day" referred to just as much as recognizing what day of the year "Bonfire Night" is.

As someone long interested in iconography and symbolism, and the subset of it that pertains to flowers in particular, the lack of real flowers around a day named for a flower baffled me. It makes a great deal of sense that they are out of season and don't store well. I understand too that paper flowers are cheaper to produce - and thus easier to mark up to a salable price to cover both labor and a useful donation to the British Legion. By buying a paper flower, one gives patronage to labor by relevant people who need it, in addition to the donation.

The paper flowers, however, are still stand-ins for the real thing. They still represent, in color and form, an actual plant. I don't think fresh flowers are at all irrelevant; they are the ideal after which the paper versions are modeled. The live poppy is the one whose original significance the paper ones carry on. There are clearly many reasons not to use a real poppy - and one of them, beyond the flower's short life span and out-of-seasonness, is tradition. And there's nothing wrong with a good tradition either.

I've read about the Peace Poppy but never seen one worn.

Speaking of which, even on wreaths (in wreaths? wreathed?), IIRC, the almost-life-sized poppies are not real.

Appropriately enough, pre-Armistice Day, Kate Greenaway's Language of Flowers says that the red poppy symbolizes consolation. Give or take the lack of seasonality to poppies on Poppy Day, days named after seasonal plants make a great deal of sense to me - blooms being temporal markers all in their own right.

Any idea which hand would be my medieval one?

Memorial Day is the generic day for honoring the war dead, while Armistice Day was to commemorate the Armistice. AFAIK, poppies were associated with the November holdiay from its beginnings. Although it was later changed to Veterans' Day, the poppies have remained associated with it, whereas their association with Memorial Day is a much later convention and probably comes from governmental efforts to remind people why we have these holidays in the first place. I don't know that this was true for all of the US, but I do know it's true for the states I've lived in -- CA, WA, and GA.