Köhler’s corn poppy plate shows Papaver rhoeas, the red poppy of farm fields. It’s plate 17 in Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen, a German book of medicinal plants. It appears in volume 3, a supplement from 1898 that Max Vogtherr prepared with help from Max Gürke. It was printed in color as a chromolithograph.
What the plate shows
The plate shows the lower part of the plant and a flowering branch. Detail drawings show a stamen, the seed capsule and the seed. The corn poppy has 4 scarlet petals, often with a black spot at the base, and hairy stems. Its buds hang down until just before they open.
The book’s description of the plate ends “Alles nach der Natur,” German for “all from nature.” It doesn’t name the artist.
The names
The book calls the plant Papaver Rhoeas L. The L. stands for Linnaeus, who named it in 1753, and botanists still use the name. Papaver is Latin for poppy. Rhoeas comes from rhoias, the ancient Greek name for the corn poppy. No one agrees on what rhoias means. The book finds “the one that falls off” the simplest guess, which suits petals that drop very easily.
The names corn poppy and field poppy come from the farm fields where it grows as a weed. It’s also the Flanders poppy. John McCrae’s 1915 poem “In Flanders Fields” made it the poppy of remembrance.
Corn poppy as medicine
Dioscorides wrote about it as mekon rhoias in book 4 of his De materia medica. In the 1800s, the petals were the part used in medicine. The book lists them as Petala Rhoeados in 10 European pharmacopoeias, including the British and French ones. Pharmacists made them into a syrup valued mostly for its bright red color, which tinted other medicines. The petals were also used for colds and in chest teas.
The opium poppy, a different species, is plate 37 in volume 1.
The Poppy Flower in our collection
The Poppy Flower in our botanical art collection is a replica of this plate, finished by hand in our workshop.
