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Breeding and collecting introduced varieties with double flowers, and colours from scarlet red to pale lemon, but the familiar deep orange and yellow variety became the cottage favourite, and also a common ornament scrambling up trelliswork in small townhouse windows. In the 1860s the famous Coalbrookdale foundry in Shropshire began producing an immensely impressive and quite beautiful cast-iron garden seat they called ‘Nasturtium’. The seat was made of wooden slats, and the back and sides were an elaborate scrollwork of nasturtium flowers and leaves.

O mistress mine, where are you roaming?

O! stay and hear; your true love’s coming,

That can sing both high and low.

Trip no further, pretty sweeting;

Journeys end in lovers meeting,

Every wise man’s son doth know.

What is love? ’tis not hereafter;

Present mirth hath present laughter;

What’s to come is still unsure.

In delay there lies no plenty;

Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty;

Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

‘FESTE’S SONG’ FROM TWELFTH NIGHT, ACT II, SCENE III

ORANGE BLOSSOM

Your Purity Equals Your Loveliness

Bring flowers, fresh flowers for the bride to wear!

They were born to blush in her shining hair.

She is leaving the home of her childhood’s mirth;

She hath bid farewell to her father’s hearth;

Her place is now by another’s side –

Bring flowers for the locks of the fair young bride!

ANON.

Of all the flowers – majestic, resplendent with colour or redolent of far-flung places – that could adorn a bride on her wedding day it is the sweet-scented, pretty orange blossom that is the favoured floral emblem. The spotless white of its blooms speaks directly of a woman’s pure character; the uncomplicated loveliness of its form signifies hope for a happy future; and the fruit symbolizes the children that the union will bring.

The tradition has romantic origins, said to lie with Crusaders who, on having observed that Moorish brides wore orange-blossom garlands, adopted the practice when they returned to Europe from their campaigns. One Victorian horticulturalist declared he did not know why such a fuss was made of it, especially as the waxy petals gave the blossom a slightly artificial look, but he admitted that no bride would feel safely and truly married if she didn’t wear it in some form on her wedding day.

From the modest Victorian marriage to the most wildly extravagant, orange blossom would usually be present: in bouquets and decoration, tucked into a straw wedding bonnet, and as ‘The Orange Blossom Waltz’. A young man who declared he was ‘going to gather orange blossoms’ meant, of course, that he was intent on leaving his bachelorhood behind. It was often adopted as a pen name in the correspondence columns of magazines, and the advice to one reader who calls herself ‘Orange Blossoms’ in the Girls’ Own Paper of March 1886 is quite firm: ‘Your duty seems very obvious to us. Banish all thought of any ultimate engagement with the expectant widower, and at the same time certainly break off your own engagement. Would you perjure yourself before Almighty God? Tell him that you had made the painful discovery that you had been too hasty in accepting his proposal.’

Paintings and prints of wedding scenes were very popular in the Victorian period, such was the importance attached to matrimonial fulfilment. One of the loveliest depictions of the subject is Stanhope Forbes’s 1889 The Health of the Bride. In this image, several generations of one family are seated around the wedding breakfast table, celebrating the marriage of a young sailor and his wife. The new bride, all eyes upon her, gazes down on her small posy of orange blossom, and a garland of it adorns her hair. Forbes sold the painting to Henry Tate, the sugar merchant and founder of the Tate Gallery, and with the profits he was able to indulge in a spot of matrimony himself, to fellow artist Elizabeth Armstrong.

When Queen Victoria married Albert in 1840, her wedding flowers were modest, consisting