The language of flowers

What it is

A flower dictionary lists plants alphabetically with a meaning beside each one. A sender chooses flowers to build a sentence, and the receiver looks them up. In practice the code was never fixed. Different books gave different meanings for the same flower, and a yellow rose could mean jealousy in one and friendship in another. Most people enjoyed the books as a parlour amusement and a source of verses for cards and albums, more than as a working secret code.

Where it comes from

Flowers carried meanings long before the 1800s, in religion, heraldry and poetry. The fashion itself is usually traced to two sources. In the 1710s Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote letters from Constantinople describing a Turkish game of sending objects, flowers among them, as rhyming messages. In 1819 a French book, Le Langage des Fleurs, published under the name Charlotte de Latour, set out a full list. Dozens of imitations followed in English, including Kate Greenaway's illustrated Language of Flowers in 1884.

How it works today

A handful of meanings survived the fashion. Red roses stand for romantic love, white lilies for mourning in much of Europe and North America, poppies for remembrance of the war dead, rosemary for memory. Florists still use the old lists when planning wedding flowers, and royal brides in Britain carry a sprig of myrtle for love and marriage. Treat any meaning as local. The same flower can say something quite different in another country.

How to take part

1. Pick the one thing you want to say before you choose any flowers.
2. Look up two or three flowers that carry that meaning in the tradition of the person receiving them.
3. Add a short card naming the flowers and what they stand for, because few people know the code now.

Good manners

• Do not assume a meaning from one country holds in another.
• For mourning and hospital flowers, follow local custom before any flower dictionary.

The flowers

RoseWoody perennial plants with showy, often fragrant flowers in many coloursForget-me-notSmall blue wildflowers known for remembrance and lovePansyA large-flowered garden hybrid with a face-like blotch in many coloursRosemaryA fragrant evergreen shrub with needle-like leaves and purple, blue, or white flowersLily-of-the-valleyA woodland plant with sweet-scented white bell flowers in late springVioletA large genus of delicate flowers found across temperate regions worldwide

Also part of it, and being written: Myrtus communis.

Sources and further reading

• Language of flowers on Wikipedia