Poppies: A Flower of Edinburgh

Every November the UK marks Remembrance Sunday, when the nation collectively remembers its war dead, an occasion symbolised by the wearing of poppies, the flowers which sprang up in the battle-torn land of the fields of Flanders after the First World War.

The Scott Monument in Princes Street Gardens is the site of the annual Garden of Remembrance, where families and organisations lay wreaths and poppies for those who gave their lives to the conflicts of 1914-18 and 1939-45.

Other war memorials around Edinburgh are also the site of poppy tributes, and many of the memorials themselves were created by the architect Robert Lorimer. His most significant contribution to the city was the Scottish National War Memorial inside Edinburgh Castle.

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You may already know that in Scotland the Remembrance poppies have four petals, whereas in the rest of the UK the design has just two petals, but did you also know that five million paper poppies are made each year at Lady Haig's Poppy Factory in Edinburgh?

The factory was set up in 1926, at the suggestion of Countess Haig, wife of Field Marshall Douglas Haig, who was born in Charlotte Square in Edinburgh's New Town, and became commander of the British troops during the First World War, including at the battle of the Somme. The factory moved to its current site, a former printing works near Canonmills, in 1965.

In 1998, Edinburgh's Lady Haig Poppy Factory became an independent charity, and today it produces eight thousand of the ceremonial wreaths laid at commemorative services across Scotland each November, continuing to employ disabled veterans and other ex-service men and women. ​

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