Birth flower
Poppy
Papaver. In the language of flowers, as lists print it today, it stands for remembrance. Kate Greenaway's dictionary of 1884 gives it another: “Consolation”. It is a custom of sentiment, not a scientific or official designation.
- Latin name
- Papaver
- Month
- August
- Meaning today
- remembranceNot the reading of 1884: Kate Greenaway gives “Consolation”.
The plant itself
Papaver is a genus. The figures below are for one species of it, Papaver rhoeas, the corn poppy of fields and the Western Front.
| Family | Papaveraceae |
|---|---|
| Native to | Macaronesia and Europe, through the Mediterranean to the western Himalaya |
| Habit | annual |
| Height | 50 cm–1 m |
| Flowers | June to August |
Kew attributes the red fields of the Western Front to seed-bank biology: corn poppy seed can lie dormant in the soil for up to eighty years and germinates when the ground is disturbed, which shelling did on an enormous scale.
Where the names come from
Late Old English had popig and popæg, from a West Germanic papua-, probably from a Vulgar Latin papavum, from the Latin papaver, poppy. The Latin itself may repeat an imitative root, pap-, meaning to swell, and the genus name, Papaver, is that Latin word.
Where the meaning is written down
- As the dictionary prints it
- ConsolationUnder the heading “Poppy, Red” in Kate Greenaway, Language of Flowers, 1884.
- As lists print it today
- RemembranceA different reading from the entry quoted here; the note below says where it differs.
Greenaway lists poppies only by colour: "consolation" is her entry for the red poppy, with different meanings for the white and scarlet forms. Ingram's Flora Symbolica (1869) gives "consolation, oblivion". The modern "remembrance" comes from the poppies of the Western Front, not from any flower dictionary.
Is it poisonous?
Its principal alkaloid is rhoeadine. Five people in Turkey who had eaten 250–500 g of the cooked plant, reported together in 2015, had between them seizures, constricted pupils, confusion and depressed consciousness; all five recovered. The ASPCA has no entry for the corn poppy, and the RHS gives it no harm rating.
Each finding above names who made it: the ASPCA's poisonous plant database, the Royal Horticultural Society's harm ratings, or a published report. This is general information and not veterinary advice — if an animal or a person has eaten part of a plant, ring a vet or a poison line rather than reading a website.