Named in Hortulus and Capitulare de villis
Opium poppy
Papaver somniferum
What was written
The poppy is in the Hortulus and in the Capitulare de villis, listed without remark among the kitchen herbs. Walahfrid writes of its seed and reaches for Ceres — a classical association rather than a monastic one. That an early medieval abbot records it as an ordinary garden plant is itself the historical point: the category it now sits in did not yet exist.
What is now known
The latex of the unripe capsule is raw opium and contains morphine and codeine. Cultivation for that purpose is a criminal offence across most of Europe, and home preparations have killed people through doses nobody could measure. The ripe seed used in baking is a different matter and is not what this entry describes.
The plant itself
An annual with grey-blue clasping leaves and a single large flower to a stem, followed by the round capsule with its ring of pores beneath the cap. It self-seeds abundantly on disturbed ground.
Still growing
Since the plant was written into that garden list, botanists, herbaria and ordinary observers have recorded finding it 126,031 times.
Live count from GBIF, cached for a week.