Flower meanings

Ask what a flower means and you get a confident answer. Ask where the answer comes from and it usually turns out to be a website that copied another website.

Here is the real picture: a handful of flower meanings are genuinely ancient and stable, and most of the rest were assigned in the nineteenth century by people compiling books who disagreed with each other. Both halves are usable — but knowing which is which changes how much weight you put on them.

Where floriography came from

The language of flowers — floriography — was a European publishing phenomenon of the early nineteenth century. The founding text is usually given as Charlotte de Latour's Le langage des fleurs (Paris, 1819), and within a couple of decades there were dozens of imitators in French, English and German, each with its own list.

The story attached to it is that Victorians conducted secret courtships in bouquets, sending messages their chaperones could not read. It is a lovely story and the evidence for it is thin. What survives in quantity is the dictionaries, not the correspondence — which is a little like proving a language existed by pointing at its phrasebook.

What is solidly documented is that the books sold enormously and that giving flowers with intent became a parlour game and a social convention. The meanings were real in the way a shared convention is real: enough people had the same book for the gesture to land.

And the compilers disagreed. The same flower carries different meanings in different dictionaries, sometimes opposite ones, because when a compiler ran out of documented associations they filled the gaps by colour, by shape, by a line of poetry, or by whatever fitted the page. That is not a scandal. It is just worth knowing before treating any single list as authoritative.

The meanings that predate the dictionaries

These are the ones with real weight, because they turn up in more than one place and long before 1819.

Rosemary — remembrance. The oldest and most secure of them all. It appears in Hamlet ("there's rosemary, that's for remembrance") and was carried at both funerals and weddings across Europe for centuries. This is not a Victorian assignment; the Victorians inherited it.

The rose — love, and secrecy. The love meaning needs no explanation. The second is better: sub rosa, under the rose, meant a thing said in confidence, from the Roman practice of hanging a rose over a table where confidences were exchanged. A rose in a picture can mean either, and the good ones mean both.

The lily — purity, and death. The Madonna lily in Annunciation paintings is the fixed reference. Its funeral use is just as old, which gives the flower a doubleness most lists flatten out.

The poppy — sleep, and the dead. Opium made the first meaning literal. The second predates the First World War by millennia, though the war made it the dominant one in English.

The laurel — victory. Unbroken from the Greek games to the word laureate.

The violet — modesty, and faithfulness. Small, low, scented, hard to find. The association is so tied to the plant's habit that it arose independently in several places.

The meanings the dictionaries gave us

These are conventions rather than inheritances — which does not make them useless, only younger than they look.

Forget-me-not — remembrance in love. Reinforced by a German legend whose earliest tellings are, awkwardly, about as old as the flower dictionaries themselves. See forget-me-not.

Daffodil — self-regard, and new beginnings. Both from Narcissus, and the two pull against each other in a way the lists rarely admit. See the daffodil's mirror.

Tulip — a declaration. Assigned from a Persian romance by way of a Turkish courtship story, then hardened into "declaration of love" by repetition. See the tulip's confession.

Hyacinth — sorrow, or apology. From Apollo and Hyacinthus, where the flower springs from spilled blood. See the remembered hyacinth.

Peony — bashfulness, and the physician's hands. Named for Paeon, physician to the gods. The bashfulness is a Victorian addition; the medicine is Greek. See Paeon's peony.

Anemone — forsaken, and letting go. From the wind that opens and scatters it, which is one of the few dictionary meanings that argues from the plant's actual behaviour. See the windflower's letting go.

Iris — the messenger. Iris carried word between gods and mortals along the rainbow, and the flower took the name for its colours. See the rainbow-bridge iris.

The ones that argue from the plant

The most durable meanings are not assigned at all — they are observed, and anyone can check them.

The sunflower tracks the sun while young and then, at maturity, stops and faces east for good. Every list knows the following; almost none knows the stopping, which is the more interesting half. See the sunflower's turn.

The snowdrop comes up through frozen ground before anything else, which is why it means return rather than hope — return is the harder and more specific claim. See the snowdrop's return.

The lotus roots in mud and opens clean above it, and it means roughly the same thing in Egyptian, Hindu and Buddhist use. When three unconnected traditions agree, the meaning is in the plant. See the whole-self lotus.

Using a meaning rather than looking it up

A meaning on its own is a label. What makes it do anything is position.

Put a flower in a radial composition and its distance from the centre becomes part of the message: at the rim it sets the situation, in the middle band it stands between you and the point, at the centre it is the point. The same forget-me-not means "this happened against a background of remembering" at the edge and "remembering is the whole subject" in the middle.

That is the mechanism behind a narrative mandala, and it is why our flower pages are composed rather than decorated. Mandala symbols and meanings covers the non-botanical vocabulary that goes with it.

All forty flowers, each with its documented meaning and its reading, are in What the Flowers Mean. Three are free to print.