''You can smell the rosemary before you get here,'' one of the late-arriving students marvelled. The perfume had come to meet her in the corridors.

''It smells like a lamb roast in here,'' another student rejoiced and yes, it was true the Proustian smell of rosemary did trigger memories of happy feasts of lamb.

Yesterday floristry lecturer Sue Burden was leading her class of certificate 2 commercial floristry students in the production of 200 poppy and rosemary boutonnieres (perhaps better known as buttonholes).

They'll be worn by invited guests at today's Anzac Day ceremonies at the Australian War Memorial.

Anzac Day gives a fillip to the whole local floristry sector, Burden (herself an owner of a floristry business) explained yesterday, but this year it was also giving her students this valuable learning activity. Each boutonniere made yesterday (after the rosemary had been clipped into little sprigs) required lots of the fiddly flower-arranging finger skills florists have to learn. First you strip the leaves off the lower part of the rosemary sprig and then add a little silken poppy to it and then bind them neatly together with a special green tape. Burden's dexterity in this was impressive (the students were a little slower) and soon there were neat little clusters of the finished works.

Bright red and bright green go strikingly well together (which may help to explain the otherwise irrationally sentimental enthusiasm for the South Sydney rugby league team) and each boutonniere was different, like a small work of art. Here, methought, is yet another thing robots will never be able to do as well, as artistically, as a trained member of our clever species.

Poppies have been associated with battlefields since at least the Napoleonic Wars (ending in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815), when after battle the battlefields eventually became upholstered with crimson poppies. The superstition was the bright red was somehow a supernatural translation into nature of all the blood spilled into the soil. But the true, and in its way just-as-magical explanation, is that poppy seeds are long-lived and can lie photo-dormant (snoozing for want of light) for decades until activities such as ploughing or heavy battle or the digging of graves churns up the soil and exposes the seeds to the light they need to germinate. No wonder then that poppies bloomed all over the churned up and tragic battlefields of the Great War, where they were famously noticed and written about by Canadian physician John McCrae:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

The herb rosemary takes its place in Anzac Day wreaths and boutonnieres not only as a symbol of remembrance of the war dead (because since very ancient times it has been believed to have herbal qualities that assist the memory) but also because a variety of it grows wild on the Gallipoli peninsula. Yesterday in a classroom in Bruce we were all remarking on a distinctive perfume that was also known to the men on Gallipoli during their ordeal, almost 100 years ago. ''We need to get a bit of a production line going here,'' Burden urged her workers. ''We're slowing down a bit.''

Everyone did seem to accelerate just a little; there was a late afternoon deadline, by which time the finished boutonnieres had to be delivered to the War Memorial, but it was still a cheerful, nattering, all-female assembly line, as if the intoxicating smell of rosemary, as well as being good for the memory, was also good for the spirits.