The Flower Code

I've known vaguely that some flowers have certain meanings, red or yellow rose for example, or carnations. But that's about as far as it goes. I had no idea that the Victorians had an ornate, symbolic code based on flowers. 

IMAGINE FOR A MOMENT THAT a messenger shows up at the door of your elegantly-appointed Victorian home and hands you a small, ribbon-wrapped bouquet, obviously hand-assembled from somebody’s garden. As an inhabitant of the 21st century, your natural inclination is to be charmed by the gift, and to search for an appropriate vase. As a wealthy inhabitant of the 19th century, your instinct is a little different: you rush for your flower dictionary to decode the secret meaning behind the arrangement.

If it’s a mix of lupins, hollyhocks, white heather, and ragged robin, somebody’s impressed with your imaginative wit and wishes you good luck in all your ambitions. By contrast, a collection of delphiniums, hydrangeas, oleander, basil, and birdsfoot trefoil means you’re heartless (hydrangea) and haughty (delphinium), and I hate you (basil). Beware (oleander) my revenge (birdsfoot trefoil)—the ultimate passive aggressive present.

Maybe somebody sent you a mix of geraniums to ask whether they can expect to see you at the next dance. If you have any striped carnations blooming in your conservatory, you can send them to the enquirer to say, “afraid not.” Victorian flower language, or floriography, was the pre-digital version of emoji; not much separates a bouquet of flowers implying you are skipping a party from a party ghost.  

There were even flower dictionaries!

In 1819, a tome called Le langage des fleurs almost immediately became the definitive word on the subject; the translations and many plagiarized derivatives of the book by Frenchwoman Louise Cortambert, writing as Madame Charlotte de La Tour, were bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic. These dictionaries weren’t inventing a language so much as amassing and collating the established meanings already in use, Beverly Seaton notes in The Language of Flowers: A History.