NARRATOR: A single, humble poppy plant is the elegant star of this still life.

REMCO VAN VLIET: It’s growing up out of the ruins. It has all these shady characters on the bottom. The mushrooms, the snake, the lizard. And the snake is only interested in grabbing that little moth. Even the dragonfly—it's also hovering around.

NARRATOR: This artist, Otto Marseus van Schrieck, earned the nickname the “Snuffelaer,” or ferreter, for his forest floor pictures set amid the undergrowth of moss-covered ground.

REMCO VAN VLIET: You see even with this poppy, it bends its neck, and it’s almost a sign that maybe you didn’t have enough water, so it was drooping, and then it rained again, so it came up again. It’s also a tubular flower, doesn’t have a very strong stem. It’s very weak.

NARRATOR: As the floral designer at The Met, Remco van Vliet has strict rules for his towering arrangements in the Great Hall.

REMCO VAN VLIET: Poppies, for instance, that's one of the few flowers I don’t mix with anything else. I just like them by themselves. Once you start adding poppies to a flower arrangement they usually dominate.

NARRATOR: Van Vliet grew up in the flower-obsessed Dutch culture, and came to New York at age eighteen. He identifies with the notoriously finicky poppy.

REMCO VAN VLIET: To me it symbolizes really that even though you have all these hardships around you and you’re coming from a difficult location in life, and a big struggle to even grow, eventually, if you fight hard enough, you grow up and reach the sunlight.

NARRATOR: Van Vliet finds it curious that the artist turns the front of the poppy away from us.

REMCO VAN VLIET: Why do we see the back of the poppy? When you look at other still lifes, you always see the front of the flowers, because it was more showing off. If a curator could turn it around, the painting, so you could see the face of the poppy; it would probably be smiling.