PERFECT POPPIES

Apoppy may seem like a strange symbol, but its origins lie in the poem ‘In Flanders Fields’, written by a Canadian doctor, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, in 1915.

The poem refers to the landscape of war-torn Western Europe, where years of bombing had turned the countryside into fields of blasted mud and splintered trees. In these killing fields, nothing would grow with one striking exception, the bright red Flanders poppies. McCrae’s poem captured