A Victorian Flower Dictionary - Mandy Kirkby [31]
In the January 1885 edition of Ye Sunflower, a Cambridge University student magazine written, it would appear, by under-graduate Aesthetes, this message appears in the agony column:
I knew you by the time, old chap, we parted,
And just this I’d say for those who have not that joy –
Their ‘ignorance is bliss’.
I knew you better every day;
You’re hardly worth a verse;
I knew you better, but must say
I also knew you worse.
SIGNED ‘THISTLE’
TULIP
Declaration of Love
My heart is smit
With love so strong
I must declare,
But have no tongue.
Come to my aid,
Thou Tulip Red,
Go and declare
My love instead.
The tulip is so familiar and dear – our spring season would not be the same without it – that it is hard to believe its true origins lie in the hot and dusty lands of the Middle East. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the time of the Ottoman Empire, the tulip was as precious to the Turks as it is to us, and they had been cultivating and bringing it to a state of perfection for hundreds of years. It was a slim, pointed flower then, pinched at the waist, its image painted countless times on tiles and vases, usually in a beautiful deep orange-red colour.
Ambassadors of the Holy Roman Empire brought the tulip to Vienna in the sixteenth century, from where it spread to the rest of Europe. But it was the seventeenth-century traveller John Chardin who noticed the tulip’s special role in the eastern language of flowers, where it was employed as the emblem by which a lover makes his passion known to his mistress. The flower’s strong, bright colour shows that the suitor is on fire with her beauty, and the black centre indicates that his heart is burned to coal, so fierce is the heat of his love. ‘Beloved’s Face’, ‘Slim One of the Rose Garden’ and ‘Those That Burn the Heart’ were some of the varieties a lover could choose from.
The mania for tulips in Holland in the seventeenth century, when bulb prices reached extraordinary heights, made the European tulip a rich man’s plaything, but by the nineteenth century it had become more affordable for ordinary gardeners. Tulip-growing was taken to great lengths in the Midlands and the north of England, where nearly every town had a tulip society and annual show. The growers were the artisans and workers of industrial Britain, who grew flowers on allotments and waste ground and in tiny back gardens. The Wakefield Tulip Society was made up primarily of shoemakers. Some famous Victorian varieties came from these growers, such as engine driver Tom Storer, who bred tulips on Derby’s railway embankments, and Sam Barlow, manager of the bleachworks at nearby Castleton. Thanks to their efforts, love could now be declared with the white and purple ‘Miss Fanny Kemble’ and the salmon-pink ‘Clara Butt’.
Tulip, or Two Lips, O which love I best?
The latter’s much sweeter, it must be confest!
The tulip is grand and gay to the eye,
But Two Lips, when prest, will electrify!
A Victorian comic Valentine card is headed: ‘Tulip – A Declaration’, and beneath is an image of a tulip in a pot, its flower replaced by the head of a monocled and bewhiskered chump. ‘All declare he’s a perfect beauty,’ reads the inscription beneath.
VERBENA
Pray for Me
In its wild form, the verbena is not conspicuously handsome, nor does it attract with a delicious fragrance, but it has a venerable ancestry and surprising associations with religion and magic. Known also as vervain, it was one of the sacred plants used by the Romans in their religious ceremonies; was said to have been used to staunch the wounds of the crucified Jesus; and was valued by the Druids in both magic and medicine, second only to the mistletoe. Many claimed also that it offered protection against witches and all manner of evil, and so the emblem ‘pray for me’ was awarded to this holy and honourable plant.
Verbenas for the garden first arrived in Europe in the early eighteenth century. These exotics from South America were tender little plants, but gardeners persevered with them for their vivid colours