New Worlds: The Language of Flowers
May. 15th, 2026 08:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swan_towerUp front, I should say that "the language of flowers" is mostly bogus.
That's not to say there is no symbolism in flowers and other kinds of plants! There absolutely is; in fact, there must be, so long as human culture has a tendency to trot out particular species or colors in particular contexts, and nature has a tendency to make some things bloom or sprout or leaf out at certain times of year. We will build up associations, because that's how our brains work.
Some of those associations will be based on color (whose symbolism was previously covered in Year Nine). Red is commonly linked with passion; therefore the floral-industrial complex has poured untold amounts of money into convincing us that only red roses are acceptable for romantic occasions like Valentine's Day. But come wedding day, you'll often see more white, because of the connection to innocence and virginity.
Other, less visible qualities can give also rise to certain associations. Notably, it's extremely common for hallucinogens to evoke witchcraft and spirits -- an easy linkage to understand! After all, hallucinogens are a great way to make you feel like you're flying or otherwise experiencing magic. And, naturally, quite a few poisonous plants have dark connotations, thanks to their peril and the opportunity they afford for murder.
Or perhaps it's the environment of the flowers. Orchids, which grow naturally in remote forests where people rarely go, are a Chinese emblem of the virtuous man, who ought to cultivate his finer qualities regardless of the approbation of others. Somewhat similarly, the lotus, rising out of muddy water to reveal its clean beauty, represents purity, enlightenment, and escape from the cycle of death and rebirth.
Behavior can play its part, too! Japanese camellias are linked with a variety of qualities like elegance and strength, but you're not supposed to give them to a sick person, e.g. when bringing a bouquet to the hospital. Why? Because that species of camellia drops its entire flower at once, in a single piece, as if it's been decapitated. Not a good omen. (In fact, some cultures feel it's deeply inappropriate to give a bouquet of any kind to someone in the hospital, lest the wilting of the cut flowers symbolically imply the patient will continue to sicken and eventually die.)
Often, however, the symbolism is just . . . there? I'm not sure anybody has a good answer for why, in European culture, lilies are associated with funerals, other than "it's been true for a very long time." And even if we do have a potential answer -- e.g. I've heard it said the soul is returning to a state of innocence, one of the qualities implied by lilies -- that may be a retroactive explanation, rather than one backed up by historical evidence.
But you may have noticed me using phrases like "one of the qualities" or "a variety of qualities." Symbolism is rarely a pure, one-to-one equation . . . and that brings us back to the language of flowers, and why it was probably never quite the thing the internet likes to claim.
The language of flowers is supposedly a form of cryptography, used to send coded messages through bouquets, boutonnières, and so on. If you try to research this, you will find elaborate claims for how it all worked -- but those claims rarely cite primary sources, and they rarely hold water.
Starting with the fact that they frequently contradict each other. Do white carnations represent first love, or disdain? Do purple lilacs signify first love, or death? Any system of communication needs enough consistency for the sender and receiver to have reasonable certainty they're working with the same message. I've seen websites claim this is why it was very important to be sure your recipient had the same dictionary of floriography as you do . . . but if that were true, we'd have a much more significant historical corpus of such dictionaries than we do. And were people really running around asking "Do you have Horton's Glossary of Flowers? No, Murrow's Floral Lexicon -- drat, I don't have that; I'll have to go to the bookseller before I send you your bouquet tomorrow -- just be sure not to use An A to Z of Floriography; I don't want you thinking I'm telling you to die --" It seems unlikely.
Also, as systems of cryptography go, flowers are wildly insecure. Their message is right there, out in the open! If lovers were secretly communicating through bouquets, you can bet that Victorian mothers would have acquired dictionaries posthaste to vet anything their daughters received. Meanwhile, if a gentleman showed up to an event wearing an ambrosia boutonnière to signify that he returns a lady's love, how many ladies there would think that message was meant for them? A bouquet sent as a gift can be targeted to the recipient, but any other display risks being broadcast to too many people. (This is also a major flaw in the supposed language of fans, though at least in that case, the signal is transient and could perhaps be "aimed" via eye contact. In reality, however, the language of fans was a nineteenth-century marketing gambit by fan manufacturers.)
Going back to that ambrosia boutonnière: just where did our gentleman get it? Kate Greenaway's The Language of Flowers -- an 1884 book that seems to be the main primary source of much writing on this topic -- lists hundreds of flowers. Even with hothouses, I'm dubious that anybody would be able to get hold of, say, red balsam on demand, just so they could signal "touch me not." On the receiving end, it assumes a high degree of botanical knowledge: could you tell the difference between marsh mallow, Syrian mallow, and Venetian mallow? Or recognize mesembryanthemum and myrobalan on sight? I know I couldn't.
As usual, though, what's realistic in history need not restrict what can fly in fiction. Thomas West's City of Iron and Ivy takes this idea and runs for the end zone, with flowers grown by magic and carrying equally supernatural effects. That gets around the hothouse problem, and where flowers can do more than just communicate, it would absolutely be worth people's time to learn the differences between various blooms. So despite the cynical objections above, I would love to see more of this in spec fic! I just appreciate it more when there's attention paid to the practicalities, rather than swallowing hook, line, and sinker the accreted pile of internet claims about how all this supposedly worked in the past.
And, of course, nothing stops you from leaning into plant symbolism more broadly, letting go of the idea that it might be for coded communication. In fact, this is a good idea, because as I said at the start, all cultures have associations for many of the plants around them. Leaning into that, even with just a few words about how a yew tree in someone's garden gives it a dark, funerary vibe, adds a tinge of realism and depth.
(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/Gw6tIH)
That's not to say there is no symbolism in flowers and other kinds of plants! There absolutely is; in fact, there must be, so long as human culture has a tendency to trot out particular species or colors in particular contexts, and nature has a tendency to make some things bloom or sprout or leaf out at certain times of year. We will build up associations, because that's how our brains work.
Some of those associations will be based on color (whose symbolism was previously covered in Year Nine). Red is commonly linked with passion; therefore the floral-industrial complex has poured untold amounts of money into convincing us that only red roses are acceptable for romantic occasions like Valentine's Day. But come wedding day, you'll often see more white, because of the connection to innocence and virginity.
Other, less visible qualities can give also rise to certain associations. Notably, it's extremely common for hallucinogens to evoke witchcraft and spirits -- an easy linkage to understand! After all, hallucinogens are a great way to make you feel like you're flying or otherwise experiencing magic. And, naturally, quite a few poisonous plants have dark connotations, thanks to their peril and the opportunity they afford for murder.
Or perhaps it's the environment of the flowers. Orchids, which grow naturally in remote forests where people rarely go, are a Chinese emblem of the virtuous man, who ought to cultivate his finer qualities regardless of the approbation of others. Somewhat similarly, the lotus, rising out of muddy water to reveal its clean beauty, represents purity, enlightenment, and escape from the cycle of death and rebirth.
Behavior can play its part, too! Japanese camellias are linked with a variety of qualities like elegance and strength, but you're not supposed to give them to a sick person, e.g. when bringing a bouquet to the hospital. Why? Because that species of camellia drops its entire flower at once, in a single piece, as if it's been decapitated. Not a good omen. (In fact, some cultures feel it's deeply inappropriate to give a bouquet of any kind to someone in the hospital, lest the wilting of the cut flowers symbolically imply the patient will continue to sicken and eventually die.)
Often, however, the symbolism is just . . . there? I'm not sure anybody has a good answer for why, in European culture, lilies are associated with funerals, other than "it's been true for a very long time." And even if we do have a potential answer -- e.g. I've heard it said the soul is returning to a state of innocence, one of the qualities implied by lilies -- that may be a retroactive explanation, rather than one backed up by historical evidence.
But you may have noticed me using phrases like "one of the qualities" or "a variety of qualities." Symbolism is rarely a pure, one-to-one equation . . . and that brings us back to the language of flowers, and why it was probably never quite the thing the internet likes to claim.
The language of flowers is supposedly a form of cryptography, used to send coded messages through bouquets, boutonnières, and so on. If you try to research this, you will find elaborate claims for how it all worked -- but those claims rarely cite primary sources, and they rarely hold water.
Starting with the fact that they frequently contradict each other. Do white carnations represent first love, or disdain? Do purple lilacs signify first love, or death? Any system of communication needs enough consistency for the sender and receiver to have reasonable certainty they're working with the same message. I've seen websites claim this is why it was very important to be sure your recipient had the same dictionary of floriography as you do . . . but if that were true, we'd have a much more significant historical corpus of such dictionaries than we do. And were people really running around asking "Do you have Horton's Glossary of Flowers? No, Murrow's Floral Lexicon -- drat, I don't have that; I'll have to go to the bookseller before I send you your bouquet tomorrow -- just be sure not to use An A to Z of Floriography; I don't want you thinking I'm telling you to die --" It seems unlikely.
Also, as systems of cryptography go, flowers are wildly insecure. Their message is right there, out in the open! If lovers were secretly communicating through bouquets, you can bet that Victorian mothers would have acquired dictionaries posthaste to vet anything their daughters received. Meanwhile, if a gentleman showed up to an event wearing an ambrosia boutonnière to signify that he returns a lady's love, how many ladies there would think that message was meant for them? A bouquet sent as a gift can be targeted to the recipient, but any other display risks being broadcast to too many people. (This is also a major flaw in the supposed language of fans, though at least in that case, the signal is transient and could perhaps be "aimed" via eye contact. In reality, however, the language of fans was a nineteenth-century marketing gambit by fan manufacturers.)
Going back to that ambrosia boutonnière: just where did our gentleman get it? Kate Greenaway's The Language of Flowers -- an 1884 book that seems to be the main primary source of much writing on this topic -- lists hundreds of flowers. Even with hothouses, I'm dubious that anybody would be able to get hold of, say, red balsam on demand, just so they could signal "touch me not." On the receiving end, it assumes a high degree of botanical knowledge: could you tell the difference between marsh mallow, Syrian mallow, and Venetian mallow? Or recognize mesembryanthemum and myrobalan on sight? I know I couldn't.
As usual, though, what's realistic in history need not restrict what can fly in fiction. Thomas West's City of Iron and Ivy takes this idea and runs for the end zone, with flowers grown by magic and carrying equally supernatural effects. That gets around the hothouse problem, and where flowers can do more than just communicate, it would absolutely be worth people's time to learn the differences between various blooms. So despite the cynical objections above, I would love to see more of this in spec fic! I just appreciate it more when there's attention paid to the practicalities, rather than swallowing hook, line, and sinker the accreted pile of internet claims about how all this supposedly worked in the past.
And, of course, nothing stops you from leaning into plant symbolism more broadly, letting go of the idea that it might be for coded communication. In fact, this is a good idea, because as I said at the start, all cultures have associations for many of the plants around them. Leaning into that, even with just a few words about how a yew tree in someone's garden gives it a dark, funerary vibe, adds a tinge of realism and depth.
(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/Gw6tIH)
