The poppy is the recognized symbol of remembrance for war dead in the UK, the countries of the British Commonwealth, and the United States. The flower owes its significance to the poem "In Flanders Fields", written by Major (later Lieutenant-Colonel) John McCrae, a doctor with the Canadian Army Medical Corps, in the midst of the Second Battle of Ypres, in Belgium, in May 1915. The poppy references in the first and last stanzas of the most widely read and oft-quoted poem of the war contributed to the flower's status as an emblem of remembrance and a symbol of new growth amidst the devastation of war.....