A Victorian Flower Dictionary - Mandy Kirkby [1]
And then, of course, there are the wedding ceremonies: from England to the United States and beyond, flowers play a part in every aspect of this important tradition, from the bridal bouquet to the centrepieces. At many weddings a flower girl precedes the bride, clutching a basket of rose petals and scattering them down the aisle. The petals she drops are meant to create a path of love and beauty that will carry the bride into her new life as a married woman.
In Asia, the Americas, Japan and Europe, these traditions have remained constant for hundreds of years. It is astonishing to realize that while everything else around us has changed – housing, transportation, technology, methods and styles of communication – flowers and their traditions have remained the same. We grow them, we study them and we give them – to guests, to hosts, to loved ones, in times of joy and sorrow, awe and appreciation. While both the traditions and the significance of the flowers vary from region to region, always there are flowers, and always there is the desire to communicate.
But what is it that we are trying to say, and why do we use flowers to try to say it? What is it about the flower itself that we are drawn to? Is it the simple expression of the cycle of life we so admire: from seed to sapling, to bud to blossom, and back to seed? Is it the courage of the first snowdrop, braving the last days of winter to push through the frozen ground? Or is it the sweet fragrance of the rose – a scent that physically changes our brain chemistry, bringing a rush of warmth and joy?
It is these questions that have spawned symbolic flower languages in almost every culture since ancient times. From the nature worship of early religions to Greek and Roman mythology, humans have assigned floral symbols to Gods and deities, prophets and saints. In the Christian faith the Virgin Mary is forever associated with the white lily, from the story of the Apostles opening her casket and finding only roses and lilies; in the Hindu religion, deities’ eyes are often represented as flower blossoms, looking out with compassion and wisdom; the Buddha is frequently depicted sitting on an open lotus blossom, the symbol of full enlightenment.
The Victorian era was the great age of the flower garden and of all things horticultural, and so it is not surprising that flower symbolism became particularly elaborate at this time. At the heart of the Victorians’ love of flowers was their strong and direct connection with nature, much more so and in quite a different way than our connection today. The majority of the population still lived on the land, nature itself was much more abundant and fruitful, and the notion that God spoke to man through the natural world, conveying messages, particularly moral ones, was an intrinsic part of everyday thinking. Increased trade and travel brought a wealth of new and exotic species from the East and the Americas, which were cultivated in hothouses and delighted over.
The origin of the western language of flowers, an intricate system of floral symbolism in which each flower is assigned a specific meaning, is thought to have been inspired by the Turkish custom of sélam – a method of communicating through flowers and other objects. In the Turkish tradition, the objects did not carry a symbolic meaning; rather, the recipient would decode the message based on guessing words that rhymed with the object.
The idea of the sélam was popularized in Europe by the Turkish Embassy Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, which were published after her death in 1763. Her letters described the sélam as a method of communication between lovers in which it was possible to send messages ‘without ever inking your fingers’, and gave examples of their meanings. She did not call this method of communication a language of flowers, nor did she suggest the creation of a western equivalent. Yet when the letters were popularized in the nineteenth century, western culture – already flower obsessed – extracted from the list of objects that which they found to be romantic (flowers),