Vivid red poppy field panorama

Bright red field of wild poppies filling a rolling hillside with spring colour. Image © fotoVoyager 2008.

In the summer I like to wander round my local Cotswold landscape on my bike ostensibly searching for locations and images but actually pretending I’m in a Tour de France breakaway leaving the peloton in my dust. Despite the occasional surges of self-righteous fury as I pass through another village of agricultural workers’ cottages transformed into twee hamlets of shiny Range Rovers and golden retrievers by affluent Londoners searching for some rural idyll that never existed I periodically come across a serendipitous vista that justifies carrying a big camera bag that ruins my svelte, slip streamed profile.

Usually a wide meadow of lush green pasture, this hillside had been transformed into a blaze of riotous colour as these delicate Corn Poppies (Papaver rhoeas) filled this flowering field from hedgerow to hedgerow. Since this species creates a long term soil seed bank that is activated when the ground is disturbed, the farmer must have ploughed the field the year before to allow these beautiful blooms to germinate. As I was shooting, an old local told me that she hadn’t seen this field blossom in this way for twenty years. The next year I returned to this location on the off chance that it had happened again and found the same field filled with a completely different wild flower, ox-eye daisies (Leucanthemum vulgare):

Just as beautiful and just as temporary. I wonder what will grow there this year…

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Top image: 1/160, f11, ISO200 20mm 9869 × 1982 pixels.

Bottom image: 1/160, f16 ISO200 20mm 9999 x 4140 pixels.

Please don’t steal these images, it’s how I make my living.