California poppies are my favorite wild flower. I have always loved them in part because I thought the California poppy was my birth month flower. The August flower is a poppy but not the California poppy (eschscholzia californica) but rather the red papaver rhoeas, the poppy we know from the In Flanders Fields poem and the paper poppies distributed to commemorate soldiers who have died in wars.
On my walk with Mady at Miner’s Ravine on Saturday, we found a few clumps of California poppies among the more prolific purple wildflowers there. We even found a bright orange poppy colored harlequin beetle, an Asian relative of the lady bug, on one of the poppy petals.
Beautiful – especially #1