Weekly Photo Challenge: Curves Of The Poppy

The petals are so big and so fine and paper-thin.

This is not a common European poppy, but something else – a cultivar from Asia, no doubt.

I photographed it in a hillside garden in the village of New Lanark in Scotland, just yesterday.

But still I think of Flanders’ Fields and the First World War.

The story of the poppies is one of those stories that has remained untainted through the years – the way they grew in countless numbers through the mud, and wove their way past the splintered bone of hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers after the carnage in Belgium and France ended in 1918.