Spring Fire

Detail of a poppy at the New York Botanical Garden (Bronx, New York)—April 21, 2024. Shirley Hibberd’s Familiar Garden Flowers wrote of poppies as follows: “No more interesting flower is to be found in the garden than the poppy, and a certain few kinds are extravagantly beautiful, though lamentably short-lived.” One of those “certain few kinds” of poppies is the “blazing red poppy” that, when present in large numbers, “suggests that we are riding through…seas of fire…”