In Belgium, which was home to part of the Western Front in its Flanders provinces, the soil was torn up by miles of trenches and pocked by bombs and artillery fire. Once soil is disturbed and the seeds come to light, poppies nobody knew existed can then bloom.ĭuring World War I, this beautiful phenomenon took place in a Europe decimated by the first truly modern war. Its seeds need light to grow, so when they're buried in the earth, they can lay dormant for 80 years or even longer by some accounts, without blooming. The common or “corn” poppy, also known as Papaver rhoeas, grows throughout the United States, Asia, Africa and Europe and is native to the Mediterranean region. As the BBC reports, the exhibition’s current stop has already drawn thousands of visitors.īut why poppies? The answer is half biology, half history. Since then, the exhibition, which was initially planned to be temporary, has been preserved and is touring the rest of the nation in two parts, Weeping Window and Wave. Created by artist Paul Cummins and designer Tom Piper, the display started out as part of an exhibition at the Tower of London and grew in size and scale as huge numbers of visitors-an estimated five million in all-came to see the bloody beauty of hundreds of thousands of red poppies pouring out of a window, each honoring a British or Colonial serviceman who died during the war. The evocative work began touring the U.K. The installation is called Poppies: Weeping Window, and it’s now on view in Wales at the Caernarfon Castle. have seen a huge field of red ceramic poppies, the symbol of war remembrance throughout the Commonwealth, pop up around well-known landmarks like the Tower of London. More than 900,000 of the dead were British soldiers, and since 2014, 100 years after the war began, thousands of people in the U.K. A century ago, “the war to end all wars” raged throughout Europe-a war that racked up nearly 38 million casualties, including upwards of 8.5 million deaths.
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