Caron Blakely has a long history with poppies.
The 77-year-old volunteer has diligently maintained the spectacular poppy garden in Edmonton’s Flanders Field Park since it was first planted in 2015 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Lt.-Col. John McCrae’s poem, In Flanders Fields — a staple of Remembrance Day. It’s a tough job, what with the weeds and the weather and the occasional flower bandits, but she says it’s worth it to honour Canada’s veterans.
“They actually planted them row on row, just like the poem,” Blakely noted.
The St. Albert Legion’s annual Remembrance Day poppy campaign kicked off Oct. 29. Volunteers have fanned out across the city to collect donations and distribute some 60,000 poppies — a flower that this year celebrates its centennial as Canada’s symbol of remembrance.
“The concept of the poppy for remembrance, of course, comes from John McRae’s poem,” said St. Albert Legion president Doug Delorme, and has been adopted by many Commonwealth nations.
Delorme said volunteers delivered poppy boxes to various St. Albert businesses and will distribute the flower pins at Canadian Tire, Costco, St. Albert Centre, and other locations from Oct. 29 to Nov. 10. All donations will go to support local veterans.
Wearing a poppy symbolizes our pledge to remember the sacrifices made by Canada’s armed forces, said Steven Clark, national executive director of the Royal Canadian Legion.
“We don’t want to break faith,” he said, paraphrasing McRae’s famous poem.
“We want to continue to show we remember what they have done.”
The poppy’s tale
Clark said the poppy’s link to Remembrance Day started on May 2, 1915, when McRae’s close friend, Lt. Alexis Helmer, was slain in battle in the Flanders region of Belgium. Distraught, McRae wrote In Flanders Fields upon seeing the many red poppies growing in the region.
Clark said poppies are everywhere in Europe and flourish in recently disturbed soil, which was everywhere during the First World War. In McRae’s poem, the flower represented hope — hope that future generations would remember the fallen so that such wars would never be repeated.
Clark said McRae actually threw out his first draft of In Flanders Fields, only for his teammates to return it to him. It was published anonymously in Punch magazine.
Clark said Anna Guérin of France read the poem and was inspired to start an Inter-Allied Poppy Day Scheme, where people could buy poppies to raise money for veterans and war orphans. Guérin took her idea to the Great War Veterans Association, the predecessor to the Royal Canadian Legion, who approved Canada’s first poppy campaign in November 1921. The poppy has been Canada’s symbol of remembrance ever since.
The Remembrance Day poppy is based on the Papaver rhoeas or the common poppy, which has red petals around a black centre, said St. Albert-area horticulturalist Jim Hole. These flowers are spectacular in bloom, but short-lived, so you don’t see them in many gardens around here.
The first Remembrance Day poppies had a long stem and silk petals, Clark said. Canadians switched to flat, paper poppies in 1922, and at some point started using plastic, contoured ones. The Legion changed the centre of their poppy pins to green in 1980 to reference the green fields of Flanders, but flipped them back to black in 2002. This year, the Legion is selling special cloth and non-fungible token poppy pins to commemorate the poppy’s 100th.
Delorme encouraged residents to wear poppies from now until noon on Nov. 11. Proper poppy protocol prescribes the pins be worn on the left side of the chest close to the heart.
Blakely said she and her fellow volunteers will do everything they can to make sure the Flanders Field Park poppies continue to look their best as they sway in the wind.
“It makes you proud to be a part of it.”
