The Spaniards called the California poppy Copa de Oro, a cup of gold, and Dormidera after its habit of closing at sundown, or on sunless days.
They called the California coastline “La Tierra del Fuego”—the land of lire or conflagration —for its seemingly limitless poppy fields that stretched mile upon flaming mile, swathes twenty miles long by ten wide, visible from forty miles away. No wonder the sun-filled cup is California’s state flower.
Since the Spaniards’ day, it has become a true cosmopolitan, at home in the gardens of Europe, Asia, and Australia. But by luckless chance, no plant has suffered such international “mixedness.”
Withered Poppy Flower
The first European plant collector on the Pacific coast, Archibald Menzies, a Scotsman, gathered a withered flower in winter and mistook it for an English Mainline. It fell to Chamisso, a botanist of French parentage raised in Germany, who sailed with the Russian’s Kotzebue expedition to California in 1815, to classify and name the plant
For his fellow scientist on that expedition, Johann Friedrich Eschscoltz, Chamisso gave the poppy a botanical tongue-twister, Eschscholzia, California.
California Poppy Population
Today, as the wildflower population goes, the California poppy is still widespread, still, a common sight though only torn fragments remain of those once limitless poppy fields, and a sailor sees now from the sea but a faint streak of fire across the hills.
“No painter has successfully portrayed the satiny sheen of its lustrous petals, no scientist has satisfactorily diagnosed the vagaries of its variations and adaptability” declares John Thomas Howell in his Mario Flora, adding: “In its abundance, this colorful plant should not be slighted: cherish it and be ever thankful that so rare a flower is common.”
44659 by Joan Parry Dutton