The association of red poppies with fallen soldiers goes back at least a couple of centuries but the story really starts in the First World War, when they sprouted in abundance across the devastated battlefields around Ypres and the Somme. Soldiers pressed poppies into their letters home and Isaac Rosenberg, in his great poem 'Break of Day in the Trenches' pulled “the parapet's poppy, to stick behind my ear". But it was the Canadian John McCrea who penned the best known poppy poem a few hours after his best friend had been killed by an artillery shell, with the memorable opening line "in Flanders fields the poppies blow, between the crosses, row on row".

This prompted a remarkable chain of events, involving an American charity worker, the American Legion, a French-woman, and finally the newly-formed British Legion, whose patron Douglas Haig underwrote the production of the first year's remembrance poppies in 1921. They were a massive hit with the public, 9,000,000 eventually made and sold, rising to thirty million the next year. It rapidly became, and remains, the major source of income for the Royal British Legion.

The story of the French cornflower started in a similar way during the Great War – the two flowers grow side by side on uncultivated land, and the French name “le bleuet” was the same as the colloquial name for their blue-uniformed soldiers. Ever since then, artificial cornflowers have been sold in aid of their veterans though not on the same scale as in the UK.