A Victorian Flower Dictionary - Mandy Kirkby [9]
But a more sombre note might prevail in rural areas, where it was said to be unlucky to bring the flowers into the house of anyone who kept poultry, because this would prevent the eggs from hatching. And in some places, Wales in particular, the daffodil was used in the traditional practice of ‘flowering the graves’ on Palm Sunday. Graves would be cleaned, weeded and whitewashed before being decked with garlands of plants, the paying of respects to the dead. It is said that the connection with mournful and unlucky matters comes from the old story that the name ‘daffodil’ is said to derive from the medieval Latin affodilus, and asphodelos in Greek – the asphodel, the plant that grew in the meadows of the underworld.
DAHLIA
Dignity
The regal and stately dahlia was first discovered by Europeans during the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the sixteenth century, where it grew in the gardens of the Aztecs. But it was not until the early nineteenth century, when the society hostess Lady Holland saw the plant growing in Madrid and sent some tubers back home, that it first appeared in English gardens. It is named after the Swedish botanist Andreas Dahl.
An anonymous Victorian poet was inspired to praise the flower’s ability to withstand the hardship of its new home, ‘though severed from its native clime’, and to encourage by its example:
And thus the soul – if fortune cast
Its lot to live in scenes less bright, –
Should bloom amidst the adverse blast: –
Nor suffer sorrow’s clouds to blight
Its outward beauty – inward light.
Thus should she live and flourish still,
Though misery’s frost might strive to kill
The germ of hope within her quite: –
Thus should she hold each beauty fast,
And bud and blossom to the last.
In Britain in the early nineteenth century, sightings of the dahlia were rare, occasionally glimpsed over the wall of an aristocratic garden, but by the 1830s it had become one of the most fashionable flowers in the country. The Victorians loved it for its sensationally bright colours and immense variety, and it became a great favourite at flower shows. The ideal dahlia was the ball-shaped type: an upright bloom with a tightly packed sphere of petals, sitting straight and composed on its sturdy stem – the perfect floral representation of dignity. A variety called ‘Little Dorrit’ appeared in the late 1850s, named after Charles Dickens’s supremely dignified heroine.
If a lady wished to be the height of fashion and her garden was large enough, a dahlia walk could be planted. Two wide borders would be filled with dahlias of different colours, with a grassy path in between, and guests could walk along it to admire the flowers as they caught the last rays of the warm sun. A bunch of the flowers given to an elderly person, the blooms at their peak in the late-summer months, would be especially heartening as autumn beckoned.
The Impressionist painter Claude Monet loved dahlias and grew them in abundance in his first garden at Argenteuil, often exchanging varieties with fellow enthusiasts the painter Gustave Caillebotte and the novelist Octave Mirbeau. Monet’s 1873 painting The Artist’s Garden in Argenteuil (A Corner of the Garden with Dahlias), one of several paintings he made of one of his favourite flowers, captures their colour and majesty against an autumn sky.
DAISY
Innocence
Daisies, ye flowers of lowly birth
Embroiderers of the carpet earth.
JOHN CLARE
The daisy was known, in Chaucer’s time, as ‘the day’s eye’, because the flower opens in the morning and closes in the evening. For centuries, this sweet and tender everyday flower has been a symbol for innocence and lack of worldliness. In the illuminations in medieval Books of Hours, the daisy stood for contempt for worldly goods and also implied that a person could learn something even from the smallest flower in God’s creation. Its association