There was a time in California, before ranchos and missions, before housing developments and freeways, when Spanish sailors viewed the coastline, seemingly ablaze in orange, and called it tierra del fuego, “land of fire.” The blaze the sailors saw wasn’t fire, but acres and acres of California poppies. The poppy’s journey to becoming the state flower, and many other aspects of the silken bloom, will be illuminated in “Poppy Talk, the Luminous Relations of the California Poppy and the Human Populations of the Bay Area and Beyond,” a lecture by historian Richard Schwartz on Nov. 2, part of the Wayne Roderick Lecture Series, in Berkeley’s Tilden Park. Schwartz’s own journey to becoming a historian, with a special focus on Berkeley and East Bay history, has taken many twists and turns. In a phone interview, he recounted how as a young man in Philadelphia, he worked three days a week on a Pennsylvania Dutch farm. “It was an amazing education,” he said. After graduating from college, he moved to California and worked for years as a Forest Service firefighter. “When my tour was over, I just kept going back to the Sierras,” he said, and this eventually resulted in his first book, The Circle of Stones, an investigation of a mysterious stone circle in the Sierras’ Stampede Country. By 1996, he had moved to Berkeley. “A friend told me to go to the Berkeley Historical Society to see a film,” he said. He did, and saw a stack of 100-year-old newspapers the society planned to discard.  Schwartz asked if he could take them and, granted permission, began to go through them and photocopy articles of interest. Eventually, he said, “I had 30 piles of articles on my living room floor.” He decided to write a book of 30 chapters, and in 2000 Berkeley 1900: Daily Life at the Turn of the Century was published with an initial printing of 2,000 copies. It sold out in two weeks. He wrote other books of local historical interest, including Earthquake Exodus, 1906 (2006), about refugees from San Francisco who fled to Berkeley after the quake and the community efforts to help them. Another of his books, called Eccentrics, Heroes, and Cutthroats of Old Berkeley (2007), tells tales such as that of a Berkeley Civil War veteran “who acted as a spy in Africa, helped catch slavers and freed a ship packed with Africans who had been kidnapped in the slave trade.” Schwartz said, “That book was about 17 people who, in their day, were known by everyone.” He continued his interest in now-forgotten figures with a book that took years to research, The Man Who Lit Lady Liberty: The Extraordinary Rise and Fall of Actor M. B. Curtis (2017). Curtis, who lived for a time in both Berkeley and Albany, led an amazing life, including providing the money for a temporary lighting of the Statute of Liberty’s torch, helping to shame Congress into funding the lighting permanently. Recently, Schwartz has focused his attention on the California poppy. “No other flower has made it into the culture as it has,” he said. He concentrated on the life story of Sara Plummer Lemmon, a Civil War nurse who moved to California post-war to heal and lived at 5985 Telegraph Ave. in Oakland. Lemmon turned herself into a well-versed amateur botanist, and began advocating for the poppy to be named the state flower. “California as a culture was maturing,” Schwartz said, “and so it could embrace something as ‘nonessential’ as a state flower.” Lemmon had to persist. The state’s then-governor vetoed the resolution, but Gov. George Pardee, of Oakland’s Pardee Home Museum, signed it, and on March 3, 1903, the poppy was enshrined. “Joaquin Miller wrote a poem about the poppy. Later, in 1917, a Los Gatos woman wrote a song about it that schoolchildren sang,” Schwartz said.  Despite the ravages of modern development, the poppy remains resilient. “Poppy seeds can remain dormant for up to 10 years,” he said, adding that they sustain through drought and frost for the right moment to germinate. Recent scientific research has begun to analyze “folds” in poppy petals which can’t be seen with the naked eye, and which produce different qualities of light. “The plant is analyzing what’s around it; it is always adapting,” Schwartz said, citing Zoe Schlanger’s recent bestselling book, The Light Eaters.  His talk will touch on all this. ‘Poppy Talk, the Luminous Relations of the California Poppy and the Human Populations of the Bay Area and Beyond,’ 10:30am, Nov. 2, Tilden Regional Parks Botanical Garden, 1550 Wildcat Canyon Rd. Berkeley. 510.544.3169. richardschwartz.info