On Mon, 19 May 2003 08:32:30 +0100, Mike
sat down and wrote:

In article , M C C
writes
On Sun, 18 May 2003 22:36:33 +0100, Mike
wrote:

In article , M C C
writes

But the seeds must have already been lying there, just waiting
for the right conditions in which to germinate.

but how long could they have been waiting?

Years sometimes, Mike!

And the seeds must have
come from parent plants so I think you'd be pretty safe in assuming that
poppies were fairly common in the corn and wheat fields.

but how long before?

For as long as those fields had been farmed, I would say.


This is beginning to bear out one of the stories :-))

Can you elaborate on the story? Somebody may have heard it, or of it,
before.



For as long as I can remember, certainly back to when I was a youngster,
I thought that the connection with the Poppy and Remembrance Sunday, was
because there was so much carnage during the First World War and so many
deaths and the blood flowed so much, that it 'Made the Battle Field look
like a field of Poppies'.

It was very recent, like a few days ago, that I heard that as the ground
had been disturbed so much, it was the right conditions for the
'dormant' Poppy seeds to germinate and thus the poppy petals blew about
the crosses.

That is why I asked the question, 'did poppies grow there in 1912 and
1913', possibly not.

Well I was told by my father, (and is a version that I think is quite
plausable) that the reason the Poppy was adopted was because it was
the first flora to grow on the mire of no-mans-land in the spring of
1919, which is after hostilities had ceased. It grew in such abundance
that its significance could not be ignored.