A Blaze of Red

poppy field
Originally uploaded by wherethewolvesare.

It's a great time of year for two wild flowers that give a really impressive display - ox-eye daisies and poppies.

Ox-eye daisies are common in these parts. Just about every roadside bank is covered with a drift of daisies. Common certainly doesn't mean ordinary, they're spectacular and, for me, a sign of high summer.

Less common, and far harder to predict their location, are fields of poppies. Not a few along a verge, I mean a field FULL of poppies, a blaze of red. This year there's just such a poppy field on my way to work between Barwick and Scholes. It's definitely not there every year - I've travelled that route for over 8 years, so those poppy seeds must have laid dormant for some time, as poppy seeds often do. There's a few daisies in amongst the poppies and some yellow flowers that I haven't even tried to identify (I'm a poor botanist). The field isn't very big but the impact is.

Wild flowers, wild man!