Madder's red — the alizarin dye extracted from the plant's roots — was the basis of Turkey red, the brilliant scarlet of British military uniforms, making it literally the color of empire and military power; A poet might write "the madder grew modest in the dyeing field, its flowers small and yellow, giving no indication of the fierce red sleeping in its roots, the color that would shout from a soldier's back across a continent"; The connection between the madder field and the battlefield — the dye producing the uniform that identified the soldier — gives the plant a tragic irony available to war poets: the innocuous agricultural crop transformed into the livery of death; In poetry about pre-industrial textile culture, madder represents the local dye industry's knowledge — the farmer who grew it, the dyer who processed it, the weaver who used the resulting color — a chain of specialized knowledge that synthetic dyes made obsolete overnight; The color red from madder — its warmth and depth distinguishing it from the flat brightness of synthetic red — has been celebrated by textile historians and poets as a quality of natural dying that chemical processes cannot quite replicate; In ecological verse about the loss of traditional dye plant cultivation, madder's disappearance from the agricultural landscape represents the severing of a direct connection between the farm and the loom that had sustained rural textile communities for centuries.