Question

Which plant is described by these clues? Linnaeus took its genus name unchanged from the everyday Latin word Roman farmers already used for this plant, so the name records nothing but long familiarity. Two green {sepals} cap the drooping bud and drop away the instant it opens, leaving the bloom on a bare stalk with no green cup beneath it. The four {petals} emerge from that bud creased and crumpled like tissue pulled from a box, ringing a dense boss of many {stamens}. Any snapped stem or leafstalk beads at once with thick pale {latex} that dries gummy, never thin clear {sap}. Its fruit carries no {style} at all: the top is sealed by a flat disc of velvety {stigma} rays, five to eighteen of them, spread like the spokes of a wheel. As that fruit dries a ring of small pores opens immediately under the disc, turning it into a pepper pot that shakes its seed out on the wind instead of splitting from top to bottom. Unlike most of its kin it is {glabrous} and smooth, dressed head to foot in a blue-grey waxy bloom that rubs off under a thumb. Its upper leaves have no stalk at all: the wavy-toothed blade wraps straight around the stem with two clasping lobes. A fast {annual} of 18 to 40 inches (45 to 100 cm) on a single {taproot}, it resents transplanting and self-sows so freely that a colony returns unbidden each year. Its epithet is Latin for sleep-bringing, given for the drowsiness the plant's milky juice has been known to induce since antiquity. Its ripe seeds are the slate-blue baking seeds strewn on bagels and rolled into strudel, pitted like a honeycomb and carrying little or no {alkaloid} inside them, and pressed they yield a pale drying oil painters favour for mixing whites. In 1805 a young German apothecary drew from its dried juice the first {alkaloid} ever obtained pure from any plant and named it for the Greek god of dreams; the scarlet flower worn on remembrance day is a different, bristly-stemmed member of the same genus.

Accepted Answer

Papaver somniferum

Name That Plant #075