Flower power

I turned over some soil by the side of the house yesterday and planted Oriental poppy seeds. Two years from now, they will look like this:



Poppies and man have a love-hate relationship. They are the state flower of California, waving in the warm breeze -- and the illegal, national industry of Afghanistan, their juices being squeezed to make heroin or morphine, the profits being used to finance Taliban terror -- and to feed a poor peasant's family.

In Flanders Fields they famously grow, amongst the graves of the World War I dead. Elsewhere, more prosaicly speaking, their little black seeds lend crunch to a bagel.

In the hospital, their powerful synthetic cousins knock out pain.

I met poppies first in the pages of literature, when I was a kid, reading of the blooms that Dorothy encountered in Oz, that lulled her to slumber. It was a very strange chapter. I was young enough to have no understanding how a flower could possibly have such power.