Common Poppy

An annual flowering plant native to North Africa and temperate Eurasia, now found across Europe and western Asia and introduced to temperate regions worldwide. It grows to about 70 centimeters and bears vivid red flowers five to ten centimeters across with four petals often marked with a black spot at the base, producing as many as 400 flowers in a season though each lasts only a day. It thrives in disturbed ground such as farmland, roadsides and fallow fields, especially where herbicides are not used, behaving as a successful agricultural weed. Since the First World War it has symbolized remembrance for fallen soldiers across Commonwealth nations, most famously through the poem In Flanders Fields, and it appears on the currency and stamps of several countries as well as carrying older symbolic meanings in Chinese, Persian and Urdu literature.