And on Remembrance Day we explore the poppies of peace… red, white and black.
Just in case you find yourself put on the spot for your colour of choice.
We all know the red poppy, of course, which is worn by everyone from royalty to commoner weeks before and including Armistice Day on November 11.
But probably don’t know that its origins hail from a Canadian medic/soldier John McCrae, American YMCA volunteer Moina Michael and French activist Anna Guerin.
All of whom added to its story before it even got to Britain in 1921.
Poppy Jocks
Now as is our way here there is another story.
And we like to claim anything good that happens in the world for my wee homeland of Scotland and the red poppy is no different.
With the red poppy celebrated in James Grant’s The Scottish Soldiers of Fortune.
With a reference to The Scots in Holland and Flanders at Neerwinden in 1693.
Where he talks about ‘the soil, fertilised by 20,000 corpses, broke forth into millions of scarlet poppies.’
And to this day the Scottish red is distinctive as being curled with four petals and no leaf.
With poppies distributed by the Earl Haig Fund Scotland, made at the Lady Haig’s Poppy Factory in Edinburgh.
Colours bleed into one
The white poppy has almost as old a history dating back to 1926 when it was championed by the No War Movement.
And has been embraced by those, particularly in the north of Ireland.
For whom the red poppy is also tied up with British soldiers and atrocities during the Troubles.
While then-Taoiseach Leo Varadkar was the first to sport a shamrock poppy in the Republic of Ireland parliament, the Dail.
There is another poppy popularised to encompass black military who fought and were injured and died in armed conflict since 2010.
And because bullets and bombs don’t differentiate on colour grounds let us then celebrate all the poppies.
And the sacrifice our own Great-Uncles Patrick and William.
Proud sons of Co. Donegal, who gave their red and green blood on a field in Flanders.