A Victorian Flower Dictionary - Mandy Kirkby [10]
Victorian children would make daisy chains as an amusement, or to form the garland of a May Day crown; a country maid might thread some through her hair as simple decoration or as an indication of her kind and innocent nature. A young woman might spend an afternoon devouring Charlotte M. Yonge’s Victorian bestseller The Daisy Chain. This 1856 novel, one of more than a hundred penned by this prolific author, was a gentle saga about a family of motherless children.
But it was as an oracle of the affairs of the heart that the daisy was universally known. The petals would be picked one by one: ‘He loves me; he loves me not’, and the last petal plucked was the indication of love’s measure.
William Morris, the craftsman and writer, disliked the fashionable and flamboyant flowers of the day, much preferring the simple and commonplace. His ‘Daisy’ pattern wallpaper was the first to be issued by Morris & Co. and was popular for over fifty years. In particular, it was bought for maids’ rooms and the bedrooms of young girls.
from TO A MOUNTAIN DAISY
ON TURNING ONE DOWN WITH THE PLOUGH, IN APRIL 1786
Wee, modest, crimson-tipp’d flow’r,
Thou’s met me in an evil hour,
For I maun crush amang the Stoure
Thy slender stem:
To spare thee now is past my pow’r,
Thou bonnie gem.
ROBERT BURNS
EGLANTINE
I Wound to Heal
Wild-rose, Sweetbriar, Eglantine,
All these pretty names are mine,
And scent in every leaf is mine,
And a leaf for all is mine,
And the scent – Oh, that’s divine!
Happy-sweet and pungent fine,
Pure as dew, and pick’d as wine.
LEIGH HUNT
The eglantine, also called the rose briar or sweet briar, is the wild native European rose, found rambling and trailing in hedgerows and country gardens. The name eglantine comes from the Old French aiglent, meaning ‘needle’, and briar is the Old English word for ‘thorny shrub’. The eglantine’s flowers, which vary in colour from deep pink to white, smell enchantingly of apple, especially after rainfall. Pleasure and pain as one are signified by this flower.
Although the new roses of the Victorian period – imports from China and France, the hybrids from the nurseryman breeders – were all the fashion, the old eglantine was much loved, grown around a garden trellis or trained along a cottage wall. It had romantic and literary associations with Shakespeare’s England and the court of Elizabeth I, whose emblem was the eglantine. Shakespeare’s love and knowledge of flora impressed the Victorians, who saw an affection for flowers as a sign of wholesomeness and simplicity.
A number of studies of Shakespeare’s flowers were published in the nineteenth century, the most popular being The Flowers of Shakespeare by Jane Giraud in 1845. Quotations from the plays and sonnets were accompanied by exquisite floral illustrations. The book would be given as a gift, to be lingered over on sunny afternoons. The eglantine appears several times; here, for example, in the description of Titania’s bower:
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine.
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight.
from A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, ACT II, SCENE I
If a Victorian lady happened to be visiting Agnew’s galleries in Bond Street in 1890, she could not have failed to notice the profusion of eglantines in Edward Burne-Jones’s ‘Briar Rose’ cycle of paintings, which were being exhibited there. The paintings depict scenes from the fairy tale The Sleeping Beauty, in which a princess pricks her finger on a spinning wheel and falls asleep, along with her court, for a hundred years. A forest of briars springs up, its deadly thorns protecting them from the outside world. The final painting in the cycle, The Rose Bower, shows the sleeping princess: