Red Poppy

Red Poppy, originally uploaded by Swami Stream.

A poppy is any of a number of showy flowers, typically with one per stem, belonging to the poppy family. They include a number of attractive wildflower species with showy flowers found growing singularly or in large groups; many species are also grown in gardens. Those that are grown in gardens include large plants used in a mixed herbaceous border and small plants that are grown in rock or alpine gardens.
The flower color of poppy species include: white, pink, yellow, orange, red and blue; some have dark center markings. The species that have been cultivated for many years also include many other colors ranging from dark solid colors to soft pastel shades. The center of the flower has a whorl of stamens surrounded by a cup- or bowl-shaped collection of four to six petals. Prior to blooming, the petals are crumpled in bud, and as blooming finishes, the petals often lie flat before falling away.


Culinary uses
The sugared, milled mature seeds are eaten with pasta, or they are boiled with milk and used as filling or topping on various kinds of sweet pastry. Milling of mature seeds is carried out either industrially or at home, where it is generally done with a manual poppy seed mill.
Poppy seeds are widely used in Andhra cuisine, Bengali cuisine, Oriya cuisine, German cuisine, Ukrainian cuisine, Malabar Cuisine (Northern Kerala), Romanian cuisine, Hungarian cuisine and the Cuisine of Austria.

In Mexico, Grupo Modelo, the makers of Corona beer, used red poppy flowers in its advertising (almost any image it used had poppy flowers somewhere in the image) until the 1960s.

More on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppy