Poppy

The opium poppy is Papaver somniferum, and it is the most consequential medicinal plant in human history.

The latex bled from the scored unripe seed capsule contains a family of isoquinoline alkaloids, principally morphine at around ten to sixteen percent of dried opium, with codeine, thebaine, papaverine and noscapine. Morphine was isolated by Friedrich Serturner in the early nineteenth century and named for Morpheus; it was the first alkaloid ever isolated from a plant, and it founded the discipline of alkaloid chemistry. It remains a reference standard for analgesia. Heroin is diacetylmorphine, synthesised from morphine and marketed by Bayer from 1898 as a supposedly non-addictive cough suppressant, which it was not.

The seeds are a different matter and are ordinary food: poppy seed contains no meaningful alkaloid content of its own, though it carries surface contamination sufficient to produce positive opiate results on drug tests, which is a documented and litigated phenomenon.

Culpeper gives the poppy to the Moon, on its narcotic and sleep-inducing action, the Moon governing sleep and dreams in his scheme. This is one of the very few attributions in the Complete Herbal where the reasoning starts from an effect that is real and reproducible rather than from an appearance. He describes syrup of poppy heads for sleep, cough and pain, and warns of its cold and stupefying force. Every element of that description is pharmacologically accurate. It is the best-founded entry in the book, and it is worth noting that it is best-founded precisely where the plant's action is strong enough to be unmistakable without any theory at all.

There is a persistent confusion between two different poppies with two different histories, and it is worth separating.

Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy, is the plant of the alkaloids, generally with large glaucous leaves and pale lilac or white flowers. Papaver rhoeas, the corn poppy or field poppy, is the scarlet weed of disturbed arable ground. It is not a source of opium and contains only trace amounts of unrelated alkaloids.

The remembrance poppy is rhoeas. Its association with the dead of the First World War is specific and documented: the species germinates prolifically on freshly disturbed soil, and the churned ground of the Western Front produced extraordinary flushes of it. John McCrae's poem In Flanders Fields, written in 1915, fixed the image; Moina Michael in the United States and Anna Guerin in France turned it into a wearable emblem and a fundraising device from 1918 onward, and the British Legion adopted it in 1921. That is a chain of named individuals across six years, not a folk tradition.

The older symbolism of the poppy as sleep and death is classical and attaches to both species without much distinction. Poppies appear with Demeter in Greek cult, they grow in grainfields, and the goddess of grain acquires the weed of the grain, and with Hypnos and Thanatos, sleep and death, who are brothers in Hesiod. Both readings, the agricultural and the funerary, are already present in antiquity, and the modern remembrance poppy sits at the junction of them by accident rather than design.