A few weeks ago, in a bookstall in Hampstead market, I found seven of the nine volumes (or ‘series’) of F Edward Hulme’s wonderful Familiar Wild Flowers, published around 1904. After a search, I tracked down (separately) the two missing volumes, paying for each almost what I’d paid for the seven I’d originally purchased (which had been a bargain). Reading through Series 1, I came across this lovely illustration and entry on the Scarlet Poppy (Papaver rhoeas) – which Hulme says is one of only two common British wild flowers that are red, the other being the Scarlet Pimpernel.
From the same pile of books by my armchair, bought recently from secondhand bookshops, I’ve also been reading a selection of poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet I first discovered as a 20-year-old student in Manchester. In the second stanza of The Woodlark is a stunning description of … a Scarlet Poppy in a wheat field. I thought the two would make a perfect pair.
From The Woodlark
To-day the sky is two and two
With white strokes and strains of the blue.
The blue wheat-acre is underneath
And the braided ear breaks out of the sheath,
The ear in milk, lush the sash,
And crush-silk poppies aflash,
The blood-gush blade-gash
Flame-rash rudred
Bud shelling or broad-shed
Tatter-tassel-tangled and dingle-a-dangled
Dandy-hung dainty head.
And down … the furrow dry
Sunspurge and oxeye
And lace-leaved lovely
Foam-tuft fumitory.
Hopkins (1844-89), an ordained Jesuit priest, never saw any of his highly unorthodox and innovative poems appear in print.
Peter Coles 