'Tempus fugit' again

In a short series which started yesterday, I am presenting these poppies which also demonstrate the life cycle of specific flowers.

I planted this poppy about six years having taken a cutting from my parents home, which was sited on the chalk soils of Berkshire. Both of my parents have since passed away after long lives, so the poppies always act for us as personal memorials of them.

I tried shooting a wide shot hoping to show the tiny single poppy flower that has self seeded about six feet from this plant, but it was very boring. I then tried a shot of just this plant with a purple Jacmanii clematis in the background. It did show all of this poppy's fifteen flowers, each of which are about five inches in diameter.

But my blip also shows the next hairy bud waiting to unfurl, just beside a seed pod which has formed already from the very first poppy flower which I blipped earlier in May. I touched and tasted the sticky black gunge that has appeared below the pod, at the junction or node of the highest leaf remaining on its stem. It makes me wonder if its acrid taste was the flavour of the medicinal compound for which this plant is renowned!

When I was driving to Teheran in the spring of 1978, I remember seeing the majesty of the hillsides of eastern Turkey, swathed for miles and miles with swaying red poppy flowers, as well as so many other beautiful wild flowers. Eventually, Mount Ararat appeared on the far distant horizon, and stayed there nearly all day as we steadily approached it. Mount Ararat is sometimes described as being where Noah's ark landed, when it appeared to them to be an island, after the Flood.