Papaver Somniferum

There are gaping holes in my ‘Poison Flower Fairies‘ painting series. This suspicious selection of characters so far includes some toxic, medicinal and aggressive types of fairies, but I have yet to add two blindingly obvious ones. One of the omissions is Atropa Belladonna, a.k.a Deadly Nightshade, both notorious and medicinal, and this is partly because I don’t know anywhere hereabouts where it grows though it must be somewhere around, and I do like to draw a plant from life even if it’s sometimes hard to track down the fairies.

The other one is almost so obvious you wouldn’t believe it was the correct plant: Papaver Somniferum, the Opium Poppy. It is a curious fact that if you try growing cannabis the police will have words to to say about it, and yet nobody cares that gardens all over the country are sprinkled with opium poppies. It’s not as if it’s a difficult thing to get the opium out, either. No, I haven’t tried it, I don’t imagine it’s my thing, but I did look it up. I found some very interesting things, but you can all use Google yourselves I imagine.

So here is a sketch I’ve been playing about with for a while: one more ‘poison’ that, like the Foxglove and Deadly Nightshade is also a massively important medicine…

The Opium Fairies – sketch