A Victorian Flower Dictionary - Mandy Kirkby [26]
The plant grows wild throughout Europe, and has been used since at least the seventeenth century for its strong scent and health-giving properties, especially its ability to calm the stomach. It was also said to stave off colds and influenza, and the menthol in its leaves could raise the body temperature and induce perspiration. Peppermint and other aromatic herbs bunched together would clear the head and sweeten the sickroom, but the oil that could be extracted from its leaves was its most valuable and useful property.
The Victorians knew peppermint in many guises, in confectionery such as mint humbugs, peppermint sticks and lozenges; as menthol cones burned to relieve cold symptoms; as a flavouring in snuff; as a tisane; and as a cordial, sometimes taken with gin to disguise the rough alcohol taste. Peppermint cordial, elderflower and hot water was a recommended cold remedy, while oil of peppermint was given to cure nausea.
If the small town of Mitcham in Surrey was the place you called home, then you knew peppermint very well indeed. It had been cultivated on a commercial scale here since the 1750s, and Mitcham became the centre of the British peppermint-growing and oil extraction industry. Mitcham mint was world-famous, renowned for its fine quality. Hundreds of local people were employed at harvest time and schools reported empty classrooms as the children went to work in the fields. (Prizes would be offered for regular attendance, but to very little avail.) Lavender was also grown in the area, acres of it, and the burning of the old lavender and the aroma of cut peppermint would hang over the town in a delicious miasma for days.
PERIWINKLE
Tender Recollections
The periwinkle’s emblem of ‘tender recollections’ has its origins in an episode in the life of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. When he was a young man, he lived for a time in rural and sensual bliss with an older woman. One day when they were out together, to her great delight, she spotted a periwinkle growing in a hedgerow. Rousseau thought little of the flower at the time, but thirty years later, long after their affair had ended, he came across a periwinkle again. All the tender emotions of that period of his life came rushing back, and the periwinkle was for ever associated with the happy days of his youth.
The periwinkle blooms in summer, long after the freshness of spring has gone, and its appearance seems heaven-sent. The simplicity and artlessness of its beautiful blue-violet flowers do seem to echo the clarity of our sweetest memories, so often those of our first affections.
The plant has grown in Britain since Roman times, and was once named the ‘joy of the ground’ for its trailing habit. It grows both in the wild and in the garden, where the Victorians would coax it to grow up and along a fence. As an emblem of recollection, it was planted near memorial urns and graves, and sometimes wound into the funeral wreath. Periwinkle was also recommended for the decoration of church windows at Easter, and along with yellow primroses could be studded into a cross made from moss and other greenery.
As the popularity of the language of flowers began to wane at the end of the nineteenth century, it fell to children’s books to continue the floral education. In Eden Coybee’s 1901 A Flower Book, an illustrated fairy story, the flowers are woken up in winter, just for one day, to pass on their emblems to the woodland sprites. Nellie Benson’s illustration for periwinkle shows a sweet child dressed in a blue tabard, listening to the flower’s message: ‘I am early friendship,’ says little Periwinkle, pensively. ‘Even the very old on earth find comfort in me.’
AT NIGHT
Home, home from the horizon far and clear,
Hither