Roman gardeners were more wholehearted in their approval. Opium poppy flowers grace the garden-room frescoes of Livia, wife of Emperor Augustus, at her villa at Prima Porta, and – most majestic ally – the garden paintings of Pompeii’s House of the Gold Bracelet, where they are deemed worthy companions to resplendent Madonna lilies, camomile, morning glories and young date palms. At Pompeii, the flower heads are painted a milky lavender, shown in profile, full face and one with the seed-head clearly forming. The townsfolk may also have followed Cato the Elder in harvesting their poppy seeds to sprinkle on globi, fried cheesecakes spread with honey, and on savillum, a kind of sweet cheesecake.
Playing on the drug’s power of consolation and oblivion, the poppy gathered more mythic associations that raised its status in the Graeco-Roman world. Although absent from the original Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which celebrated the ancient Greek goddess of marriage, good health, fertility and agriculture (known to the Romans as Ceres), the poppy soon attached itself to the goddess, fusing the opium poppy’s power to assuage grief with the attributes of the corn poppy, traditionally found growing among the grain crops of barley and corn. Poppy capsules and sheaves of grain became the goddess’s two principal symbols; and poppies may have played a part in the Eleusinian mysteries that celebrated both the winter descent of Demeter’s daughter Persephone into the dark underworld of Hades, and her springtime return to her mother.
The opium poppy was also associated with the ancient Greek gods Nyx, the god of night; Hypnos, the god of sleep; and his son Morpheus, the god of dreams. In his Metamorphoses, the Roman poet Ovid situates the god of sleep’s home deep in the hollow of a mountainside, beyond reach of the sun and human clamour, where
Before the cavern’s mouth lush poppies grow
And countless herbs, from whose bland essences
A drowsy infusion dewy night distils
And sprinkles sleep across the darkening world.
Just such poppies would slip into the dark dreamworlds of German Romanticism, as in the ‘sweet intoxication’ of the poppies in Novalis’s Hymns to the Night and their mirrored image in Philipp Otto Runge’s painted Moonrise; these are poppies that mark the boundary between real space and the territory of dreams. Empowered perhaps by association with the more potent opium poppy, Demeter’s corn poppies would much later metamorphose into the Flanders poppy of Remembrance Day, growing in ground disturbed not by tilling but by war.
AFTER ROME’S FALL in the fifth century CE, the use of opium declined for a time in the West but the poppy itself continued to thrive, planted sometimes in kitchen gardens – as in St Gall’s idealized monastery plan – and sometimes among the medicinal plants of the infirmary garden, or bought specially for the sickroom. Emperor Charlemagne included it among the plants that were to be grown on his royal estates; and in the calm of the monastic garden at Reichenau Island in Lake Constance, the ninth-century abbot Walahfrid Strabo planted poppies in his small garden plot and pondered their significance in verse, calling them Ceres’ poppies
because, mourning the loss of her stolen daughter,
She is said to have eaten poppy to drown her sorrow, deep
Beyond measure – to forget, as she longed to forget, her grief of mind.
It was usual then to distinguish between two sorts of Papaver somniferum, the white and the black poppy, differentiated by the colour of their seeds rather than their petals. The white poppy was generally treated as a garden plant and the wilder black poppy as the ‘medicinal’, opium-yielding variety, although there is in fact no botanical difference between the two, and botanists now view the species as having developed from an ancient cultivated crop with semi-wild self-sown varieties, not found in a truly wild state.
The supposed distinction between black and white poppies lingered into Elizabethan times. Of the black poppy, the herbalist and barber-surgeon John Gerard explained that it was the same as the white, ‘saving that the flowers are more white and shining, spotted or str[e]aked with some lines of purple. The leaves are greater, more jagged, and sharper pointed. The seede is likewise blacker, which maketh the difference.’ In his garden he grew single and double white poppies, a single purple poppy and possibly a double black poppy, but identifying pre-Linnaean varieties is always problematic. Like Pliny before him, Gerard seemed awed by opium’s potency in the sickroom, declaring that it ‘mitigateth all kindes of paines: but it leaveth behinde it oftentimes a mischiefe worse then the disease it selfe . . . Wherfore all those medicines and compoundes are to be shunned that are made of Opium, and are not to be used but in extreme necessitie.’ Gerard’s fear of the plant echoes that of the poet Edmund Spenser, who planted ‘Dead sleeping Poppy’ in The Faerie Queene’s Gardin of Proserpina [Persephone] along with ‘mournfull Cypresse’, ‘trees of bitter Gall’ and the ‘blacke Hellebore’. No savoured flower of Elizabethan delight, Spenser’s poppy was ‘direfull deadly blacke both leafe and bloom, / Fit to adorne the dead, and decke the drery toombe’.
Revising Gerard’s text in the 1630s, the London apothecary Thomas Johnson left the original entry for the poppy virtually unchanged, adding a showy new variety that demonstrated how poppies were developing into stars of the flower garden. This new sort had leaves that were ‘much more sinuated, or crested, and the floure also is all jagged or finely cut about the edges, and of this sort there is also both blacke and white. The floures of the blacke are red, and the seed blacke; and the other hath both the floures and seed white.’
John Parkinson, royal herbalist to Charles I, added several more varieties in his book of garden flowers, selecting only those beauties deemed worth of respect: double white poppies, double red or blush poppies, and double purple or murrey poppies, their flowers ‘eyther red or blush, or purplish red, more or lesse, or of a sad murrey or tawney, with browne, or blacke, or tawny bottomes: the seed is eyther of a grayish blew colour, or in others more blackish’. Unsure where his poppies originated, Parkinson tells us that many had been ‘often and [a] long time in our gardens’, sent from Italy and other places, and that the double wild kinds came from Constantinople, although ‘whether it groweth neere unto it or further off, we cannot tell as yet’.
The poppy’s great flowering in the gardens of Europe coincided with the age of the aristocratic florilegium, in which the sunflower also gained an appreciative following. Fine double poppies feature in the Hortus Floridus of Crispin de Passe the Younger (1614), and in Emanuel Sweert’s Florilegium of 1612. But the finest of all appear in Basilius Besler’s Hortus Eystettensis, already admired for its sunflowers. Here are the most evolved and decorative kinds of opium poppies, multi coloured and multi-fringed like pompom chrysanthemums from China and Japan, or dahlias from South America. Here, too, are lavender-eyed and two-tone varieties mixing red with white or purple-violet: monstrous blooms, it must be said, which have shed their dignity along with their beauty.
After Besler, the opium poppy’s horticultural star could only gently wane in the flurry of more exotic plants crowding into the flower garden. A century or more later Philip Miller, gardener to the Society of Apothecaries at Chelsea, marshalled the many varieties of garden poppies in his Gardeners Dictionary, describing some as having very large double flowers, variously variegated, while others were finely spotted like carnations. ‘During their short continuance in flower, there are few plants whose flowers appear so beautiful,’ he admitted; ‘but having an offensive scent, and being of short duration, they are not much regarded.’
The queen of ‘paper mosaicks’ in Georgian Britain, Mary Delany, nonetheless found a bright-red opium poppy attractive enough to turn into one of her most celebrated collages composed of minute strips of cut paper. Floating out of its black background, a leaf of her poppy wraps itself around the flower stalk as it might in three dimensions. Displaying skills of a more didactic kind, the physician Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s grandfather, included the opium poppy in The Loves of the Plants, his ambitious if ponderous attempt to poeticize botan
y and teach his readers Linnaeus’s system for classifying plants by their sexual parts:
Sopha’d on silk, amid her charm-built towers,
Her meads of asphodel, and amaranth bowers,
Where Sleep and Silence guard the soft abodes,
In sullen apathy PAPAVER nods . . .
So begins the poppy’s entry in Canto II, and while frankly it never improves as a poem, it hints at opium’s fantastic visions – ‘the pleasure-dome, the airy music, the sorceress, the half-living statue, the embracing lovers in the icy wind’ – reflecting Darwin’s medical knowledge of opium’s power to stimulate dreams, and the sensation of intense cold that accompanies withdrawal.
The poppy’s beauty continued to flare periodically in the botanic and scientific canons of the age, as in Henry Phillips’s Flora Historica, his companion to the History of Cultivated Vegetables. While his vegetable book had warned against opium used incautiously, and especially the dangers of dosing children with opiates, his Flora waxed lyrical over the poppy capsule, whose ingenuity in design he considered vastly superior to watches or miniature musical boxes, and a potent sign ‘of the wisdom with which it has been formed by the Universal Creator’.
A more down-to-earth survey of the opium poppy’s historical, geographical, nutritional, medicinal, botanical and horticultural virtues appeared in The Ladies’ Flower Garden of Ornamental Annuals by Jane Loudon, author of The Mummy! Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, published in 1827, whose inventiveness had caught the eye of the man who became her husband, the phenomenally prolific gardening writer John Claudius Loudon. As garden flowers, Mrs Loudon judged opium poppies ‘very ornamental, and when judiciously intermixed, they produce a fine effect in a tolerably large garden; though they take up too much room to look well in a very small one’.
The Irish gardener William Robinson was similarly approving. An advocate of wild gardening with hardy naturalized plants, he praised the opium poppy as a beautiful and variously coloured hardy annual. ‘The double scarlet, the double striped, and the double white are all varieties of this,’ he wrote in the first edition of The English Flower Garden, ‘and the flower-heads, being of great size, make a bold and striking effect when planted in masses.’ He singled out for special praise the ‘Paeony-flowered’ variety of the species with its very double broad-petalled flowers in shades from pure white to dark crimson.
Gardeners today use opium poppies in much the same way: as bold emphasis plants, valued for their striking colour effects. The high priests of colour planting in the 1990s, Canadians Nori and Sandra Pope declared a fondness for single and double black forms, whose natural promiscuity they tamed by ruthlessly weeding out any misfits that dared to intrude on the colour design for their Somerset garden.
OF COURSE, Papaver somniferum has earned its place among the most powerful flowers in history not for its garden effects but as a source of the narcotic and analgesic drug. While opium does not cure the ailments it is used to treat, it relieves their symptoms and, in the words of the Stuart apothecary John Parkinson, ‘by procuring sleepe, easeth many paines for the present, which indeede it doth but palliate or cause to be quiet for a time’. As a stimulant, it induced initial euphoria, Parkinson said, but prolonged use ‘bringeth very often more harme, and a more dangerous disease then it hath allayed, that is an insensiblenesse or stupefaction of a part or member, which commeth to be the dead palsie’.
Rooted in classical pharmacology, the drug’s early history has already been told. By the time of Rome’s fall, opium production had spread around the eastern Mediterranean, into Egypt and across to Asia Minor, which became a major centre of cultivation and production. In Byzantium, the poppy’s ghostly flowers appear in the exquisitely illuminated, early sixth-century copy of Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica made for a Byzantine princess, Juliana Anicia, daughter of the emperor Olybrius and a great patron of the arts. Arab medicine embraced the drug, passing it on to the Persians, then to other nations further east, aided by the spread of Islam, which proscribed the consumption of alcohol. When Persia’s Shah ‘Abbas II tried to enforce a ban on wine, opium use increased so sharply that he was forced to soften the prohibition and take measures against the opium trade. Carried by Arab merchants, the drug reached India and then China, reputedly through medieval India.
Just as western – essentially Greek – medicine travelled east and informed the great medical traditions that flowered in the Moslem world, so Arab, Islamic and Persian ideas returned to the West in translations, among them the Tacuinum Sanitatis, a medieval handbook on health and well-being based on an eleventh-century Arab medical treatise by Ibn Butlan of Baghdad. Opium appears indirectly, as one of the sixty-plus ingredients in theriac, recommended for cold temperaments and old people, especially if taken in winter in cold regions. The opium in such preparations was flavoured with nutmeg, cardamom, cinnamon and mace, or simply with saffron and ambergris. Highly prized in the late Middle Ages, it was often sent as a gift by the sultans of Egypt to the doges of Venice and the sovereigns of Cyprus.
From theriac developed a variable preparation known as laudanum, composed of opium – often known as ‘opium thebaicum’ – and other ingredients, available initially in solid form and later as a tincture. Credit for introducing laudanum to western medicine traditionally goes to the Swiss Renaissance physician Philip Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim (d. 1541), better known as Paracelsus, who rejected the medical orthodoxies of his day and travelled for years all over Europe and on to Russia, Lithuania, Egypt, Hungary, the Holy Land and Constantinople, practising as an itinerant physician and developing his own system of humanist medicine. Increasingly wild and embittered, he became in effect the Luther of medicine and was viewed by many of his contemporaries as a mysterious Doctor Faustus, able to perform miracles.
One such ‘miracle’ could surely be attributed to the opium he used in his treatments. Here, for instance, is Paracelsus’ recipe for a sedative to be used in cases of the falling sickness (epilepsy):
Take opii thebaici 2 drachms, cinamoni ½ ounce, musci ambre ½ scruple of each, corallorum ½ ounce, mandragore ½ drachm, succi hyosciami 1 drahm, masticis 3 drachms. Mix these, crush them, prepare a lozenge and add stewed hop-juice. Put the compound into a quince. Close it again, then put it into a dough and let it bake in an oven as if it were bread. Take it out and crush it, one half-ounce to five ounces of arcanus vitriolus.
Following Paracelsus’ example, poppy-based preparations proliferated in medical herbals throughout Europe. William Langham included nearly three pages of poppy remedies in The Garden of Health of 1597 – forty-six entries in all, some containing multiple prescriptions. Langham recommended poppies in cases of abscess, aches, backache, bellyache, broken bones, bruises, catarrh, consumption, colds, cough, gout, fever, women’s flowers, fluxes, frenzy, headache, holy fire, hoarseness, inflammation, joint aches, kernels, hot liver, scrofula or the king’s evil, ‘sleepe to cause’ (for which there were twenty-one remedies), hot swelling, thirst, throat kernels, ulcers and women’s ailments. His remedies called for seeds or plants of the black, white and garden poppy, fashioned in various ways. Bruised with women’s milk and egg white, ripe white poppy seeds could be applied hot to the temples and forehead to provoke sleep, for instance, as could a spoonful of syrup of poppy, or oil of poppy applied to the temples.
Far more cautious in his use of poppy preparations was William Turner, the great Tudor naturalist, physician and divine. In the second part of his herbal, he quoted the twelfth-century Moslem polymath from Spain, Averroes or Ibn Rushd, who classed the poppy as cold and moist according to the humours of Galenic medicine, the white poppy being cold to the third degree and the black to the fourth degree, declaring that ‘the white bringeth a pleasant sleep, but . . . the black is evil and maketh a dull or sluggish sleep’. Turner’s fear of opium came from accidentally swallowing a little opium mixed with water while washing an aching tooth. Within the hour his wrists had swelled, his hands itched, ‘and my breat
h was so stopped that if I had not taken a piece of the root of masterwurt, called of some pilletory of Spain [Peucedanum ostruthium], with wine, I think that it would have killed me’. He gave advice on how to treat suspected opiate poisonings: induce vomiting by drinking pepper and the scrotum of a beaver in honeyed vinegar, wake the patient by thrusting stinking things up his nose, bathe him in warm water, then feed him fat meats and hot wine.
Gentler remedies found their way into the good housewife’s medicine chest, using seeds harvested from white poppies sown in her kitchen garden at the new moon in February or March. In The English Huswife of 1615, Gervase Markham advised treating family members troubled with ‘too much watchfulnesse’ with a dram of dried and powdered saffron mixed with an equal amount of dried and powdered lettuce seed and twice as much pulverized poppy seed, moistened with women’s milk and applied as a thick salve to the patient’s temples. Powdered white poppy seeds and oil of violets applied to the back and kidneys could help reduce fevers; while fevers that started with a cold called for a concoction of dragon water, rosewater, brandy, vinegar and half a spoonful or less of mithridate – a compound similar to theriac, which usually contained opium. Poppy by-products also cropped up many times in the medical profession’s early listing of drugs (in Latin), the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, where they appear under herbs and simples, waters, syrups, lohochs (a thick linctus), conserves and sugars, chemical preparations (nepenthes opiatum), and – as laudanum – among the pills, in a recipe that also contained saffron, beaver, ambergris, musk and oil of nutmeg.
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