Flower Coloring Pages

What the flowers mean

For most of recorded history people said in flowers what they could not say out loud. The Victorians turned it into a whole grammar - which bloom, how many, which hand you held them in - but the practice is far older and far wider than one century in England. Below is the meaning behind the flowers you will find on this page, taken from the same research that went into the printed book.

The sunflower - and the trap in it

The Greeks told of Klytia, a girl who loved the sun so much she followed it across the sky day after day until she rooted in the ground and became a sunflower. We repeat the story as devotion. Read it again and it is also a warning about the cost of facing one direction forever. That double reading is why the sunflower opens the collection.

Forget-me-not - the smallest, most stubborn claim

A flower whose entire name is an instruction. In folklore it is what the drowning man called out as the river took him. It has meant remembrance ever since, which is why it turns up on memorials far more often than on bouquets.

The thistle - a guard, not a weapon

Scotland's emblem, and the reason is a story about an invading army that stepped on one barefoot in the dark and gave itself away. A thistle is not aggressive. It simply cannot be grabbed. That distinction is the whole of what a boundary is.

Lavender, poppy, ivy

Lavender for the pause - it was strewn on floors so a room would smell calm before anyone entered it. The poppy for sleep and for the dead, long before it meant remembrance in November. Ivy for what holds on: it was given at weddings for fidelity, and it is also the plant that pulls down the wall it climbs. Most of these meanings carry their own opposite. That is not a flaw in the tradition; it is the tradition.

How to color botanical line art without it going flat

• Work from the centre of a bloom outward, so the darkest value sits where the petals meet.
• Leave one petal on each flower noticeably lighter than the rest. A single highlight does more for depth than shading every petal carefully.
• Greens go muddy fastest. Mix at least two - a warm one for the near leaves, a cool one for anything behind - and the page stops looking like a printed sheet.
• If a page has a border of small repeated shapes, color it last and quickly. It is meant to be the rest between the demanding parts, not another demanding part.

The daffodil, and the boy who could not look away

Narcissus was not vain in the way the word now means. He was cursed to love something he could never hold, and what he found at the water's edge was his own face. The flower that grew where he died bends its head toward the ground - which is either a picture of shame or a picture of a bloom heavy with its own weight, and the tradition has never quite decided. Daffodils are also the first thing up after winter in most of Europe, so the same flower carries both self-absorption and new beginnings. Coloring one is a good place to notice how comfortably a symbol holds two opposite meanings.

The tulip's confession

Tulips broke a country's economy. In 1637 a single bulb of a particular striped variety changed hands in Holland for more than a craftsman earned in a decade, and then the market collapsed in a matter of weeks. What made those bulbs valuable was a virus - the streaking that collectors paid fortunes for was a plant disease. In the older language of flowers a red tulip is a declaration of love, and knowing the rest of the history makes that reading sharper rather than sillier: the most expensive beauty in Europe was an illness.

Daisies, cornflowers, and the flowers nobody protected

Not every flower in the tradition is grand. The daisy opens at dawn and closes at dusk - its English name is a worn-down version of "day's eye" - and it has meant plain honesty for as long as anyone has written the meanings down. The cornflower grew in grain fields and was pulled up as a weed, then became a symbol of what survives being unwanted; it is the national flower of Germany and it was the flower Queen Louise picked for her children while hiding from Napoleon. Both are drawn here at the same size and detail as the showier blooms, which is the point.

Snowdrops and the flowers of the threshold

Snowdrops come up through frozen ground and are often the only living colour in a February garden, which is why they mean hope everywhere they grow. They are also, in a good deal of British folklore, unlucky to bring indoors - a flower of graveyards, not of tables. That combination is typical of this whole tradition. The flowers that mean the most tend to be the ones people were slightly afraid of.

A short history of saying it in flowers

The Victorians did not invent floriography. They systematised it, published dictionaries of it, and turned it into a parlour game, but the practice of sending meaning with a plant is much older and shows up in Ottoman court letters, in Shakespeare's Ophelia handing out rosemary and rue, and in medieval religious painting where every flower in the background is doing theological work. What the nineteenth century added was the idea that the meanings could be looked up - and that is also when they started to contradict each other, because different dictionaries disagreed and every publisher wanted to sell their own.