Tag Archives: poppy

The phenomenal poppy

19 Friday May 2017

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170519 poppy

For Floral Friday this week, a most remarkable flower. Did you know
> a single poppy seed head contains 1000 seeds and each plant can have as many as 20 heads?
> of those 20,000 seeds as many as 85% (that’s 17,000) seeds will germinate if conditions are right?
> prior to farmers using chemical weedkillers, a one-acre cornfield could potentially have contained 100 million dormant seeds?

Facts garnered from Richard Mabey, Weeds: How vagabond plants gatecrashed and changed the way we think about nature (Profile Books, London, 2010), a most fascinating read.

A poppy for Aberfan

21 Friday Oct 2016

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Today was the fiftieth anniversary of one of the saddest days in Welsh history. Wales is a country that has seen more than its fair share of mining disasters but they usually involved the men, the Welsh miners, explosions, and cave-ins. On this day, 21 October 1966, the tragedy was even worse, as the 144 people who died included 116 children, happily attending the village school when a colliery spoil tip collapsed, sending a huge landscape down the hillside, obliterating everything in its path. Today, in Wales, we remembered the children of Aberfan.

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