A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
poppy
A poppy is a plant with a milky sap, crumpled petals that unfold from a hairy bud, and a dry pepper-pot seed capsule that scatters through holes under the rim when the stem is shaken. Field poppies germinate in disturbed soil and can sit in the ground for eighty years or more waiting for it, which is why they appear in numbers on ground that has just been broken and nowhere else.
Etymology
The word is Old English, taken early from Latin, and it has been in the language for well over a thousand years. Its association with sleep is as old as the word. The opium poppy is a different species, and Greek and Roman writers linked the whole genus to sleep, to night, and to the dead long before anyone in northern Europe had seen the drug.