The RSA placed an order for 350,000 small and 16,000 large silk poppies with Madame Guérin’s French Children’s League. One of Guérin’s representatives, Colonel Alfred Moffatt, suggested the idea to the New Zealand Returned Soldiers’ Association (as the Returned Services' Association or RSA was then known) in September 1921. Over the next year Guérin and others approached veterans’ groups in Canada, Great Britain, Australia and other countries, urging them to take up the practice. Known as ‘The Poppy Lady of France’, she made the poppy an international symbol of remembrance. This would remember the fallen and benefit the women and children of France, who would make the artificial poppies, and Allied veterans and their families. In 1920 she conceived the idea of ‘Inter-Allied Poppy Day’. Madame Guérin held the first Poppy Day in the United States in 1919. Guérin, who had been invited to speak at the event by Frederick Galbraith, the Legion’s second National Commander. The American Legion adopted it as its memorial flower at its annual convention in September 1920. Michael set out to have the red poppy adopted in the United States as a national symbol of remembrance. Two days before the signing of the Armistice (11 November 1918), she wrote a reply to McCrae: 'We shall keep the faith'. Among them was Moina Michael (1869–1944), who worked in a YMCA canteen in New York.

Many people were moved by the pathos of ‘In Flanders fields’. As he lay dying, he is reported to have said, ‘Tell them this, if ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep.’ Keeping the faith Little more than two years later, on 28 January 1918, McCrae died of cerebral meningitis. Legend has it that McCrae threw away the poem, but a fellow officer rescued it and persuaded him to send it to the English magazine Punch 'In Flanders fields' was published on 8 December 1915. In a cemetery nearby, red poppies blew gently in the breeze – a symbol of regeneration and growth in a landscape of blood and destruction. Distressed at the death and suffering around him, McCrae scribbled the verses in his notebook. In May 1915, McCrae conducted the funeral service of a friend, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, who had died in the Second Battle of Ypres (Ieper). The connection was made most famously by a Canadian medical officer, Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, in his poem, ‘In Flanders fields’. It was one of the first plants to grow and bloom on battlefields in the Belgian region of Flanders. The red or Flanders poppy has been linked with battlefield deaths since the Great War (1914–18). In many countries, the poppy is worn on Armistice Day (11 November), but in New Zealand it is most commonly seen on Anzac Day, 25 April. People in many countries wear the poppy to remember those who died in war or are serving in the armed forces. It was adopted by The Royal British Legion as the symbol for their Poppy Appeal, in aid of those serving in the British Armed Forces, after its formation in 1921.The red poppy has become a symbol of war remembrance the world over. The poppy came to represent the immeasurable sacrifice made by his comrades and quickly became a lasting memorial to those who died in World War One and later conflicts. The significance of the poppy as a lasting memorial symbol to the fallen was realised by the Canadian surgeon John McCrae in his poem In Flanders Fields. Once the conflict was over the poppy was one of the only plants to grow on the otherwise barren battlefields. In late 1914, the fields of Northern France and Flanders were once again ripped open as World War One raged through Europe's heart. The destruction brought by the Napoleonic wars of the early 19th Century transformed bare land into fields of blood red poppies, growing around the bodies of the fallen soldiers. Scarlet corn poppies (popaver rhoeas) grow naturally in conditions of disturbed earth throughout Western Europe. But how did the distinctive red flower become such a potent symbol of our remembrance of the sacrifices made in past wars? The poppy has a long association with Remembrance Day.

Parts of the remembrance poppy