Jefferson's Monticello poppy garden erased from public memory

http://www.alternet.org/story/145872/how_the_dea_scrubbed_thomas_jefferson%27s_monticello_poppy_garden_from_public_memory

This is how they do it - scrub things from memory just like in George Orwell's "1984". If you haven't read it, or haven't read it in a long time, please find a copy and READ IT. I'm reading it now and just came across a spectacular passage I will enter here maybe tomorrow.

My mother's pride and joy was her flower garden. The flamboyant oriental poppies, always orange - for no other color would do - bloomed mightily under her hands. They bloomed with the quieter, sweeter peonies, after the tulips. Put those magnificent flowers in Grandma's cut glass vase, the one that sang like a fairy chime, and you just had to stand back and marvel.

We did not extract the juice. We were not poppy addicts. My mother explained that the sap was used to make heroine, and in Chinatown, in those dark allies, and curtainless windows there were ugly places where ugly dope addicts lived in squalor. They smoked opium pipes. It ate their brains. They died of their addiction.

But the seeds were harvested to decorate rolls.

And they were beautiful.

Did I want to end up in Chinatown, in the dirty, dark places, an addict?

HELL, NO!

And so, my mother divided her plants every year and gave them to friends, family, gardeners she barely knew who admired them, just like her grandmother from Cuba did.

It's a family thing.

Bright, brilliant, hot orange, we just love poppies. And so did old Tom Jefferson.

How sad the paranoia of the federal government, taking away our freedom even to enjoy a flower.