National Geographic Magazine/Volume 31/Number 6/Our State Flowers/The Golden Poppy

The Golden Poppy (Eschscholtzia californica Cham.)


No State has chosen its representative flower more appropriately than California. The golden poppy, the very essence of California's sunshine, has woven its brightness into the history of the Pacific coast. During the spring months, when it covers valley, field, and mountain side with a cloth of gold, men, women, and children make a festival of poppy-gathering like the Japanese at cherry-blossom time.

Tradition alleges that a tilted mesa north of Pasadena when aglow with poppies in the spring used to serve as a beacon to coasting ships more than twenty-five miles away, a tale which is not wisely questioned by one who has never seen the glory of a golden-poppy field. Certain it is that early Spanish explorers saw some of the hillsides covered with these flowers and named the coast “The Land of Fire.” It was “sacred to San Pascual,” they said, “since his altar-cloth is spread upon all its hills.”

No State flower had more lovely rivals—Baby Blue Eyes, the butterfly or Mariposa tulips, the gilias, the lupines, and the California peony have a firm hold on the affections of nature lovers in a Commonwealth from whose floral treasures the finest cultivated gardens in the world have been enriched. But the golden poppy safely outdistanced all competitors and is now the crowned queen of the land of the setting sun.

The scientific name of this poppy was acquired when a Russian scientific expedition under Kotzebue, in 1815, explored what is now California. Chamisso, the naturalist of the expedition, named it for Dr. Eschscholtz, a companion naturalist, the Eschscholtzia californica. It is an unfortunate name; and the extra “t” must have been inserted amid that array of consonants with deliberate intent to appall the English eye and paralyze the English-speaking tongue. Though copa de oro, the Spanish “cup of gold,” has a poetic attractiveness, yet it is not much used, even by the Spanish Americans.

Source: —, ed. (June 1917), “Our State Flowers: The Floral Emblems Chosen by the Commonwealths”, The National Geographic Magazine 31(6): 487. (Illustration from page 502.)