![]() Poppies can hybridize with other colors and forms, so next year you could have something a little different. Store indoors in plastic bags or containers. Saving some is insurance to make sure you have more next fall! If you’re lucky, many will re-seed on their own next year. When the seed head turns brown and the top “pops up,” it’s time to get a bucket and clip the stems to drop in. In late spring, you can collect the seeds to save for next year. Late October to mid-November is a good time to plant them, after temperatures are slightly cooler. Lightly water in to firm their soil contact. Scatter on top of cleared soil and barely cover. The seeds are very tiny, so you don’t want to bury them. They’re lovely against native yellow columbine or non-native larkspurs and other springtime flowers. Seed them among dormant perennials for a burst of color in spring to feed bees and other insects. Like native poppies and California poppy, we plant corn poppy seeds in the fall. I reached for a used yellow envelope, turned the blank side up and hastily scribbled my pledge to keep the faith with all who died.There are many non-native poppies, but one of the most common for us is corn poppy, also known as Flanders poppy. So I felt impelled to make note of my pledge. In hectic times as were those times, great emotional impacts may be obliterated by succeeding greater ones. Alone, again, in a high moment of white resolve I pledged to KEEP THE FAITH and always to wear a red poppy of Flanders Fields as a sign of remembrance and the emblem of ‘keeping the faith with all who died’. If ye break faith with us who die we shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders Fields’. It seemed as though the silent voices again were vocal, whispering, in sighs of anxiety unto anguish, ‘To you from failing hands we throw the Torch be yours to hold it high. This was for me a full spiritual experience. If ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders Fields’. ![]() The last verse transfixed me - ‘To you from failing hands we throw the Torch be yours to hold it high. “I read the poem, which I had read many times previously, and studied its graphic picturization. In her autobiography, ”The Miracle Flower, The Story of the Flanders Fields Memorial Poppy” written in 1941 on the eve of World War II, she wrote: She saw a copy of the Ladies Home Journal with the poem in it with its ascending illustration (below left.) Though she had read the poem many times she was struck by accompanying artwork. In 1918 an American Young Womans’ Christian Association worker (and college teacher) Moina Belle Michael was attending a YWCA Overseas War Secretaries’ conference in New York City. The poem begins with: In Flanders fields the poppies grow.* It became the most quoted poem of the era. After revisions and one rejection by The Spectator it was published 8 December 1915 in P unch Magazine. After writing the poem with a pencil stub he showed it to a couple of soldiers then reportedly tossed the poem away but it was recovered by those who read the first draft. ![]() At the service McCrae mentioned the poppies. Sitting in an ambulance on, he wrote the poem “In Flanders Field” the day after personally conducting a burial service for a friend, Alexis Helmer. Canadian John McCrae was a poet who was also a surgeon and medical officer on the front lines.
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