In 1921, the Returned Soldiers and Sailors Imperial League вЂ“ the forerunner to todayвЂ™s RSL вЂ“ sold its first poppies for Armistice Day, importing silk flowers from France and selling them for a shilling.ДЄlmost a century later, the poppy has become the enduring symbol of the human cost of war, and is worn on lapels across the nation each November 11. It is considered an agricultural weed, an annual herbaceous species of a flowering. She spoke about it at a meeting of YMCA secretaries attended by Anna GuГ©rin, who began making silk poppies in France to raise money for war orphans. Other common names aside from red poppy are common poppy, corn poppy, corn rose, field poppy, and Flanders poppy. Its references to the red poppies that grew over the graves of fallen soldiers resulted in the remembrance poppy becoming one of the worldвЂ™s most recognized memorial symbols for soldiers who have died in conflict, said scholars. When she came across the poem three years later, American Moina Michael was so moved that she vowed to always wear a poppy in remembrance of those who had lost their lives, and began campaigning for the flower to be adopted as a national symbol of remembrance. Flanders Fields is a common English name of the World War I battlefields in Belgium and France. His words are still read each year on Remembrance Day: Devastated by the death of a young soldier, Major McCrae wrote the poem during the second battle of Ypres in 1915, and it was eventually published in Punch.

It was a Canadian doctor, Major John McCrae, who penned the poem first associated poppies with remembrance. For many, their scarlet petals echoed the bloodshed of the Great War and they became a powerful symbol of the loss of life the conflict represented. On September 27, 1920, the poppy became the official flower of The American Legion family to memorialize the soldiers who fought and died during the war. On the battlefields of the Western Front, in soil churned up by shelling and trenches, poppies were among the first flowers to bloom.

Remembrance poppy fields