How the poppy has endured as our symbol of war and remembrance

In 1916, in the middle of the Great War, 2nd Lieutenant Leonard (Len) James Shaw of the 2nd Auckland Battalion sent a pressed Flanders poppy in folded paper to his niece Jessie Osborne in Waikato.

Shaw had picked the poppy at night from his trench on the Western Front. His sporadic correspondence with Jessie was a small but vital connection to his family and home.

“I thought you might like some little thing,” he wrote in an accompanying letter, “pieces of shells are too big to send, and I think flowers much nicer.”