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qualities of a woman’s heart. A token for a friend would have pansies in it, as might a lover’s gift, and delicate depictions of the flower adorned the front covers of photo albums. Mrs Warburton, a character in Louisa May Alcott’s 1887 A Garland for Girls, explains why she is wearing a pansy brooch. It belonged to her elder sister, whose sweetheart gave it to her when they were about to be parted. ‘This pensée is a happy, faithful thought of me. Wear it, dearest girl, and don’t pine while we are separated.’ Her sister is no longer alive, but the pensée continues to carry its loving message.

The pansy was also a popular motif in the Elizabethan era, known to be a favourite of the Queen herself. It appears on a pair of richly embroidered gloves from that time, alongside a weeping eye. The eye refers to the tears shed over lost or unrequited love, and the pansy signifies the hope that that love should not be forgotten.

from HEARTSEASE COUNTRY

Sister, the word of winds and seas

Endures not as the word of these

Your wayside flowers whose breath would say

How hearts that love may find heart’s ease

At every turn on every way.

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

PASSIONFLOWER

Faith

This lovely climbing plant entwines and embraces as it grows, offering sturdy support for its flowers and fruit. Its blooms can be found in a multitude of colours, more commonly a striking white streaked with purple. Their unusual beauty is fascinating enough, but more wonder is to come, for represented in the intricate structure of the flower are the mysteries of Christ’s Passion. The central column is the cross itself, the five anthers the five wounds received, and the three stigmas signify the nails that secured him to the cross. The crown of thorns can be seen in the filaments that radiate from the base. It is said that nature itself is grieving at the crucifixion, and that the passionflower is the floral apostle.

This symbolism was first described by a seventeenth-century Italian monastic scholar. He had been given drawings and descriptions of the passionflower by Jesuit missionaries who had travelled with the conquistadors in South America, the plant’s native land. For him the flower signified the triumph of Christianity, growing as it did in a non-Christian community: ‘The flower is a miracle for all time.’ And as European cultivation of the passionflower grew, so did its meaning as an emblem of religious faith.

The passion-flower, with symbol holy,

Twining its tendrils long and lowly.

Prayer and Easter cards were decorated with images of the flower, as were the bindings and title pages of prayer books and printed sermons. On Holy Cross Day, 14 September, the flower would be brought into the church in celebration, and draped around the font and holy statues.

Rebellious young ladies who refuse to go to church might learn from the lesson told in The Passion Flower, a novel of 1873. Young Myra Duval has inherited gypsy blood from her mother and a certain wilfulness from her father, which combine to make her a wayward character, resistant to religion. ‘What can we know of God or heaven?’ she declares. She follows her own passions and causes much grief to others, but finally finds happiness in the Christian faith and, to the relief of all, enters a nunnery.

A young nun contemplates a passionflower with some intensity in Charles Collins’s Convent Thoughts. She is in the cloister garden and has been distracted from her reading of a missal by the natural beauty of the flowers around her. Perhaps she has had a moment of doubt, but nature, the design of God, has confirmed her commitment to her calling. ‘I meditate on all Thy works; I muse on the works of Thy hands’ was the quotation from the Psalms that Collins added to the painting’s catalogue entry when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1851.

PEPPERMINT

Warmth of Feeling

This little creeping plant is a lover of moisture and can be found in damp and shady places, woodland clearings and the banks of streams and ponds. It is named after the Greek nymph Menthe, who was