Remembrance Day is coming up — and as a gardener who adores poppies, I’ve always found the story of Flanders Fields profoundly moving for two reasons. Up here, northwest of Toronto, winters get too cold and windy for the seeds of the Flanders poppy — a tissue-paper-thin annual variety called Papaver rhoeas — to stick around for long. “Yes, some Flanders poppies do self-seed here and come up the following year,” Val Harrison, curator of the museum, confirmed. They also hold a fundraising drive on the first Saturday of every May, when packets of poppy seeds donated by various seed companies are on sale. Scatter that seed in your own garden, then return at the end of June to see the panoply of poppies blooming at McCrae House.

Source: thestar November 10, 2017 21:56 UTC