Yesterday at eleven o'clock I stood on the allotment with a fork in the clay and kept the two minutes' silence. It was harder than I expected. Somewhere in the middle of it, looking down at the ground I'd just turned, I found the answer to a question Cody had asked me the day before, which I had answered badly. This week is about the poppy: where it came from, why it grew where it did, and how to grow it yourself.

"In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row"

— John McCrae, In Flanders Fields, 1915

On poppies, two minutes, and what comes up when the ground is turned (7 min read)

Hello friends, Gary Stewart here.

Ten to eleven on Sunday morning, and the allotment was as grey and still as I'd hoped it would be. Low cloud, no wind to speak of, nine degrees. The clay at the end of my plot had taken the week's damp and turned heavy and dark, and each forkful came up in a slab that held the shape of the tines. Somewhere behind me a robin was working through the same short phrase it had been working through all morning.

I told you on Thursday that I was going up for the quiet. I'd like to report that I found it.

What I actually did, for the best part of an hour, was dig with one eye on my phone. I had promised myself, and more or less promised you, that I'd stop at eleven, and I was so anxious not to miss it that I checked the time every few minutes. A man standing in the most peaceful place he knows, fretting about a silence. If you'd been watching from the next plot, you'd have seen someone keeping an appointment rather than keeping anything else.

At eleven I pushed the fork into the ground and left it standing there, and I stood too.

Two minutes is longer than you think. The first thirty seconds were full of the week: the list for Monday, the email I hadn't answered, whether I'd shut the greenhouse door. Then, slowly, less. The robin. A car on the road beyond the hedge, then not even that. My own breathing, which I don't believe I'd heard all week. And my eyes, with nowhere else to go, settled on the ground in front of my boots: the clay I'd just turned, broken open, wet and dark, showing its underside to the sky for the first time since last winter.

That was when I thought of Cody's question.

The answer I didn't have

On Saturday, while I was pinning a poppy to his coat, Cody asked me why it had to be a poppy. Why not a rose, or a daisy, or something else that's red. I've worn many poppies throughout my adult life. I said something about poppies growing where the soldiers fought, which is true as far as it goes, and he seemed satisfied.

I wasn't. I knew the picture, the field of red, the crosses; I had never once asked what the poppy was doing in that field in the first place.

Standing over that turned clay, I realised the answer had been under my boots the whole time.

The seed that waits

The poppy in question is Papaver rhoeas: the field poppy, the corn poppy, the Flanders poppy, depending on who you ask. It's an annual, which means it does everything in a single year. It germinates, it grows, it flowers, it sets seed, and it dies, and the whole of its future is left behind in the seed.

It leaves a great deal of it behind. One plant can make thousands of seeds, each smaller than a grain of salt. Most of them don't come up the following year. They fall into the soil, get buried, and wait. Poppy seed needs light to wake, so for as long as it stays buried it stays asleep, and it can stay that way for decades.

It isn't waiting for warmth. It isn't waiting for rain. It's waiting for the ground to be broken.

When a plough goes through a field, or a spade through a bed, or a fork through the clay at the end of an allotment, some of that old seed is lifted to the surface, the light reaches it, and it germinates. That's why poppies have always lived on the edges of farming: in cornfields, on fresh verges, on building sites, on allotments. They're thought to have arrived in this country with the earliest farmers, carried in the seed corn, and they've followed the plough ever since. A poppy is the flower of disturbed ground.

Why Flanders

Which brings us to the fields of northern France and Belgium.

Between 1914 and 1918, the ground there was turned over more violently, and more often, than any soil had ever been: by shelling, by trenches, by mines, by the digging of graves. Seed that had lain quietly in those fields for years was thrown up into the light, and in the springs and summers that followed, the poppies came in numbers nobody had seen. They grew over the craters and along the trench lines, and among the graves.

In the spring of 1915, near Ypres, a Canadian army doctor called John McCrae buried a friend, and soon afterwards he wrote a short poem about the poppies growing between the crosses. In Flanders Fields was published that winter and read all over the English-speaking world.

In 1918, an American teacher named Moina Michael read it, promised herself she would always wear a red poppy in memory of the dead, and then spent years persuading everyone else to do the same. In France, a woman called Anna Guérin had arrived at the same flower from a different direction: silk poppies, made by widows and children in the devastated regions of France, sold to raise money for those the war had left behind.

In 1921, Guérin brought her poppies to Britain. The British Legion, founded that same year, ordered nine million of them, and on the 11th of November 1921 they sold out. That first appeal raised over £106,000 for ex-servicemen and their families. Within a year, the poppies were being made here, by disabled ex-servicemen. The one on your coat this month comes down from that.

So when Cody asks again, I'll have a better answer. It's a poppy because poppies were what grew in ground like that. They were there because the ground had been broken.

What the fork turns up

I don't want to make this tidier than it is. Nothing good came out of that shelling. The poppies didn't redeem it, and they didn't explain it; they simply grew in it, because that's what the seed does when the soil is opened. It's possible to stand in front of a red field and feel two things at once: that it's the most beautiful colour in the English countryside, and that it only comes up where something has been torn.

I think that's exactly why it works, and why it travelled from one poem into nine million buttonholes in six years.

We all carry things beneath the surface. People we've lost, mostly. The memory of them settles down into us the way seed settles into a field: still there, still alive, but buried and quiet and, most days, invisible. We get on with things. The surface gets walked on. Then something turns the ground over, a date or a smell or a song or a silence, and up it all comes into the light.

Remembrance Sunday is the country deciding to turn the ground on purpose. Once a year, at the same minute, together. The two minutes are the fork going in.

I want to be careful here. The silence isn't for me, and it isn't for my nerves or my busy week; it belongs to the people it's kept for, and I'd rather not turn it into something else. But keeping it on Sunday did show me something about myself, and I'll pass it on honestly. I could not remember the last time I had stood completely still, on purpose, for two whole minutes. I needed the whole country to stop before I could.

For a lot of us, I suspect, it's the only time all year.

Sowing your own

The other thing I learned from Cody's question is that November is a good month to sow field poppies. So here is what I've found, and what I'm going to do.

Sow them now, or wait until March or April. Autumn sowing gives earlier flowers, and the seed seems to come up better for having had a winter's cold. Either way, sow them exactly where you want them to flower; poppies hate being moved, and the seedlings rarely survive it.

Clear the ground of weeds and rake it to a fine, crumbly surface, then scatter the seed thinly over the top. Mixing it with a handful of dry sand helps you see where it has landed. Don't cover it. It needs the light, remember. Press it gently in with the back of the rake or the flat of your hand, so the seed is touching the soil, and then leave it alone.

Don't feed them. Poppies are used to the hungry edges of fields, and rich soil only gives you plenty of leaf and very little flower. They want sun and they want to drain, which is where I have to be honest about my clay. It isn't ideal. Poppies like dry feet, and Norfolk clay in winter is many things, but dry isn't one of them. Still, field poppies come up along the margins of arable fields all over this county, and the end of my plot gets dug every year whether it needs it or not, which is half the job done. I'll rake some grit into the surface and see.

Seed is easy to find in packets, usually sold as field poppy or corn poppy. If you'd like something a little softer for a border, the Shirley poppies are a garden selection of the same plant, in pinks and whites as well as red.

And if you want them back next year, remember what they are. Let some of the seed heads ripen in late summer, shake them over the ground, and turn the soil again in autumn. Leave the ground undisturbed and the poppies will fade out within a season or two, because the seed is waiting for something you've stopped doing.

My plan is a strip along the path end of the allotment, and a big pot by the back door for Cody, so that next summer, when he asks why poppies, he can watch one come up out of ground he scattered himself. I'll tell you on Thursday whether either of them actually got done.

The week ahead

The forecast is cool, grey and mostly dry: eight to ten degrees by day, with the nights sliding towards freezing by the weekend and a chance of the first proper frost on Friday or Saturday. Good weather for scattering seed on cold ground and walking away from it.

Wednesday is Armistice Day, and this year the eleventh hour lands in the middle of a working morning. I don't know yet where I'll be when it comes round. Probably not on the allotment; probably somewhere with a screen in front of me and a list beside it. I'll stop anyway. Two minutes is long, but I've had a little practice now.

The seed is still in the ground. It always was. It's only waiting for us to turn it over.

Gary Stewart writes every week from a small garden on Norfolk clay.

No expertise, no ideal garden, just what the soil taught him that week.

Written slowly, at the speed of the garden, for people who read every word.