A recurrent theme on this blog has been poppies. It’s a beautiful flower, but also not very particular as to where it grows, and almost certain to make a comeback no matter how you mow it down or pull it up. There will be many more poppy pictures in the coming months. This one, however, is special. This is a yellow poppy.

The California poppy, the so-called golden poppy, is indigenous to California, and is orange. I wrote about driving north with my family as a boy through endless fields of poppies in a post titled Golden and how magical it seemed. But this is not a California poppy, though it looks almost identical, it’s something someone bought at a nursery or bought seeds for and planted near the back corner of the library. I’m sure it’s color was much more noticeable in person. It really stunned me when I saw it.

Poppies, it turns out come in a variety of colors: red, white, blue, black and red, red with a fringe of white, a beautiful purple with an elaborate center, which is the source of heroin, as well as yellow and orange. I suspect there are many more varieties, but you would have to travel around the world to see them, or make a few more clicks on the internet. Orange is enough for me, but I can also imagine infinite fields of yellow. I wonder if yellow poppies will start showing up in sidewalk cracks and in yards downwind of the library.