"Coquelicot Lavande" Cotton Tidy Box

In English literature of the nineteenth century, poppies symbolised sleep or a state of oblivion, however, since the First World War, a new, more powerful symbolism has been attached to the poppy.  During the First World War, red poppies were among the first plants to spring up in the devastated battlefields of northern France and Belgium, and the Flanders poppy ("coquelicot") has long been a part of Remembrance Day that marks the Armistice of 11 November 1918.