Friday, November 12, 2010

Yellow Poppy

Every spring, a wide variety of flowers ornament my garden, thanks to my wife’s love of flowers and gardening. While I join her to admire her mature flower plantation, it also provides me a chance to satisfy my photographic hobby. The bright yellow poppy above was once part of our spring plantation. The beautiful fully grown petals spread out majestically to all directions while exposing its full bloom.

Poppy flowers have generally 4-6 petals, but some species also have up to eight petals. Oriental poppies, natives of the Mediterranean region, have the largest flowers, often six to eight inches across. The popular, many-colored Shirley Poppies are cultivated forms of the corn, or Flanders poppy, a common wild flower of Europe and Asia. Poppy comes in many colours; red, blue, orange, yellow and white. While the ornamental poppy flowers are used in homes and garden, wild poppy provides ingredients for food and drugs and their extracts are also used for making opium. The wild poppy has gray-green leaves and white to purple flowers and the juice for opium making is extracted from its unripe seed pods.

Poppy is a symbol of both death and sleep, mainly because of its ability to produce opium. The bright red coloured poppy in Greco-Roman mythology symbolizes death. But home grown poppies for use in gardens and decoration have more pleasant use and display value.

Photo: Flora-Poppy (Jalalspages at Flickr)

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