A Victorian Flower Dictionary - Mandy Kirkby [14]
CEREMONY UPON CANDLEMAS EVE
Down with the holly, ivy all,
Wherewith ye dress’d the Christmas hall;
That the superstitious find
No one least branch left there behind;
For look, how many leaves there be
Neglected there, maids, trust to me,
So many goblins you shall see.
ROBERT HERRICK
Many young ladies’ magazines included seasonal features on Christmas handicrafts, including how to make a motto out of holly leaves. Letters would be cut out of the leaves, sewn on to brown paper or card to spell out a seasonal greeting, then brushed over with liquid glue. Berries could be made by coating peas with red wax. No Christmas card was complete without the holly, often shown as a wreath crowning Father Christmas’s head, or as a small bunch suspended over children’s beds to keep them from harm. The exchanging of this lovely evergreen, albeit in pictorial form, provided everyone with a talisman to take into the future.
‘I send the old, old greeting tendered year by year, for a Happy Christmas and a glad New Year.’
HYACINTH
Blue – Constancy Purple – Please Forgive Me
White – Beauty
With its soft perfume and delicately coloured blooms shaped like tiny bells, the hyacinth brings the promise of spring to a season of grey shadows and glowering skies. When there is so little scent and colour in the garden, its presence is precious and must be truly savoured.
Thy leaves are coming, snowy-blossomed thorn,
Wake, buried lily! Spirit, quit thy tomb!
And thou shade-loving hyacinth, be born!
EBENEZER ELLIOTT
Classical legend tells us that the hyacinth took its name from Hyacinthus, a beautiful youth with whom Apollo was besotted. But during a game of discus-throwing the god accidentally struck Hyacinthus on the forehead and he fell to the ground, fatally wounded. His drops of blood were turned into hyacinths, the drooping nature of their flowers echoing his bowed head as he stooped in agony. It is said that the hyacinths were purple, and so that colour’s emblem echoes for ever Apollo’s tragic mistake.
The hyacinth came to Europe in the treasure trove of bulbs given to Europeans by the Ottoman Turks. These early hyacinths looked very different from the popular varieties familiar to the Victorians: the arrangement of flowers was like that of a bluebell, tapering to form a pyramid shape. But eighteenth-century cultivation packed the hyacinth with double flowers, thus retaining its beauty and perfume for weeks on end. It became a highly desirable plant, its bulbs fetching high prices, especially in Holland where skilful Dutch nurserymen bred hundreds of new varieties.
By the nineteenth century the craze had died down, and hyacinths could be obtained at a trifling cost, affordable by both queen and cottager. At Christmas time they would be brought from the greenhouse to flower indoors on the mantelpiece amongst the holly boughs and ivy. A small but exquisite arrangement for the dinner table could be made by taking individual hyacinth flowers and mounting each ‘pip’ on wire around a hothouse camellia, set against a spray of dark green asparagus fern. A Christmas bouquet of white and blue hyacinths would be a wonderful gift for one’s betrothed; perhaps the white ‘Queen Victoria’ and the dark blue ‘Bouquet Constant’.
The January 1860 garden column of the popular fashion magazine the New Monthly Belle Assembleé recommended the Hyacinth Bottle and Flower Support as being ideal for growing these flowers indoors. The slender bottle with bulbous base was nothing new; hyacinths were often grown in water, not soil, in these small glass vases, which usually came in a variety of colours from cranberry red to cobalt blue, but the supporting wire was an innovation, designed to support the stem with its heavy bloom and keep it all neat and tidy. Edward Prentis’s