A Victorian Flower Dictionary - Mandy Kirkby [17]
Since earliest times, lavender has been put to use as a disperser of sweet scent around the house. The Romans added it to their baths for its sharp, clean fragrance, and the plant’s botanical name, Lavandula, is derived from the Latin lavare, meaning ‘to wash’. The Victorians considered it an old-fashioned flower, but nevertheless a deserving favourite and quite indispensable. It could be purchased very easily, from lavender sellers or from the ordinary flower-girl, but was rarely bought as an addition to a bouquet or for display around the house, perhaps because its meaning is such a negative one. Instead, conscientious house-wives would place bundles of lavender in drawers or behind books; young girls would slip some amongst the folds of their bridal trousseau. The dried flowers, sewn into bags of pink or violet net and tied with a velvet ribbon, could be given to a niece or goddaughter, and ladies would tuck small sachets of it into their corsets as a deodorant. Yardley’s or Perks’s lavender water splashed on to a handkerchief soothed a fevered brow, and lavender burned in the sickroom removed stale air.
LAVENDER SONG
Won’t you buy my sweet blooming lavender,
Sixteen branches one penny,
Ladies fair make no delay,
I have your lavender fresh today,
Buy it once you’ll buy it twice,
It makes your clothes smell sweet and nice.
It will scent your pocket handkerchiefs,
Sixteen branches for one penny,
As I walk through London streets
I have your lavender nice and sweet,
Sixteen branches for a penny.
TRADITIONAL
LILAC
First Emotions of Love
Ah, let me weave a chaplet for your hair,
Of pale and rosy lilacs, lady fair.
Woe to the lover who would choose a rose
That in its heart a stinging bee may close.
Or yet a lily, or a spray of vine,
Or any bloom that wreathes a cup of wine.
The flower I gather, love, for your sweet sake
Breathes love that neither time nor ill can shake.
PERSIAN LOVE SONG
The lilac is a perfect union of perfume, grace and delicacy. From the first purplish bud to the full bloom, all is in happy harmony, and there is no greater delight than the return of its appearance in spring. The pale tints of the blossom and its short and transitory beauty seem to evoke youthful femininity, that first flush of loveliness as girlhood merges into womanhood. It marks the beginning of summer and of love.
Lilac has grown in Britain since the time of Henry VIII, when it made its way from the Middle East via Europe. The name comes, via French, Spanish and Arabic, from the Persian lilak, for ‘blue’ or ‘bluish’. In spite of its connection with exotic countries, it is a plant very much at home in an English garden and was well loved in Victorian times, often evoked in the literature of the day. In David Copperfield, Charles Dickens places the lovely and naïve Dora under a lilac tree when Copperfield comes to call, bringing her a small posy of flowers from Covent Garden. When Jane Eyre is first to marry Rochester, he tries to dress her in silk, but she decides her lilac gingham dress is far more suited to her youth and loving feelings.
There is no better depiction of the meaning assigned to the lilac than John Everett Millais’s 1859 painting Spring. A group of girls sit under apple trees in full bloom. They have come to pick the wild flowers in the orchard and have stopped to take a rest. One stands out from the others, as she is half standing, and it cannot escape anyone’s notice that she has a spray of lilac tucked into her hair. Its presence indicates that they are all awaiting, perhaps have even experienced, their first emotions of love.
In 1880 the composer and conductor Frederic H. Cowen wrote a graceful and very popular pianoforte duet for the lilac in his series of short musical pieces called ‘The Language of the Flowers’. Its short epigraph reads:
I dreamed that love
should steal upon the heart like summer dawn
on the awakening