Welsh Poppy

This is one of my favourite flowers, and its visiting honeybee seems to be fond of it too: the Welsh Poppy. It grows in poor conditions and deftly reproduces, bursting hundreds of little seeds onto the surrounding soil. Within a year, several generations of the flower might have come and gone. It is also the symbol of Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party. The real flower is considerably prettier than their concentric parody; only the Conservatives’ version of an oak tree offers nature greater insult.

Nations are good and proper, ordained by heaven. Nationalism, if it be divorced from xenophobia, need not be harmful. Yet dividing the world’s population by nationality is ultimately irrelevant. The differentials of sex, race, orientation or some other label, are soon to be utterly extraneous. On the day of judgment, the issue will be what one did with Jesus Christ and His gospel, that and nothing else. Like Welsh poppies in my back yard, nations come and go; they germinate, blossom and wither, but the word of the Lord endures forever.

And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us. Acts 17:26-27