Rosemary for remembrance. Rue for regret. Yellow carnations for disdain, striped carnations for refusal, purple hyacinth for sorrow, and a whole grammar of coded messages passed between lovers who could not speak plainly. It is a wonderful idea. It is also, as a system, almost entirely a nineteenth century publishing phenomenon, and I want to work through it here as a case study, because it is the clearest example I know of how an invented tradition acquires an ancient pedigree.

What is actually old

Plants have carried meaning for as long as anybody has written anything down. That part is not in dispute.

  • Rosemary for remembrance is genuinely old. Ophelia says it in Hamlet, around 1600, and Shakespeare is drawing on existing usage rather than inventing it. Rosemary was carried at funerals and at weddings across early modern Europe.
  • Rue for repentance, the herb of grace, likewise appears in the same speech and the same tradition.
  • Bay for victory, olive for peace, lily for purity, rose for love: all classical, all Mediterranean, all attested for millennia.

Individual plant meanings, in other words, are ancient, real and scattered across many cultures.

What is not old

The system. The idea that there exists a complete, consistent, dictionary-style code in which any flower can be looked up and any message assembled, and that lovers used this code routinely to conduct secret correspondence. That is nineteenth century, it is largely French and then British, and it is a product of the publishing trade.

The commercial origin point is usually given as Charlotte de la Tour's Le Langage des Fleurs, published in Paris in 1819. It was enormously successful and set off a craze. Dozens of imitators followed on both sides of the Channel through the 1820s to the 1880s, each producing its own dictionary.

And they do not agree with each other. This is the tell, and it is decisive. If you compare two floriography dictionaries from the same decade you will find the same flower assigned different and sometimes opposite meanings. A genuine shared code cannot function if the participants own contradictory dictionaries. What you are looking at is not a language in use; it is a genre of book.

The claim that the whole thing descends from Ottoman sélam, a Turkish practice of sending objects with rhyming associations, comes into English via Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's letters from Constantinople in 1717 and 1718. That practice was real, but it worked on rhyme rather than symbolism, it was not confined to flowers, and the leap from it to a European flower dictionary was made by European authors looking for an exotic pedigree.

The pattern to notice

This is the reason I have put this article on the site. Look at the shape of what happened:

  1. A real but patchy body of traditional plant meaning exists.
  2. A book systematises it, fills the gaps, and sells extremely well.
  3. Competitors publish rival systematisations with different content.
  4. A century later, all of them are cited as evidence of an ancient tradition.
  5. Nobody checks whether they agree with each other.

Now compare that with the Ogham tree calendar, the eightfold wheel of the year, and half the crystal correspondence tables in circulation. It is the same process every time. A genuine but incomplete inheritance, tidied into a complete system by a single author, then aged backwards by everyone who came after.

Floriography is the most easily provable case because the books are all still there and you can put them side by side. That is why it is worth doing.

Why I still use it

Here is where I part company with the debunking.

Being a Victorian invention does not make something useless. It makes it a Victorian invention, which is a real thing with a real history and a hundred and fifty years of use behind it.

Floriography is:

  • Genuinely widely known, which for a symbolic language is the only thing that actually matters. A code nobody shares is not a code.
  • Beautiful, and assembled by people with a serious eye for it.
  • Embedded in the culture, in Victorian painting, in poetry, in mourning customs, in the flowers people still choose for funerals and weddings without knowing why.
  • Available, in full, free, out of copyright, in dozens of editions.

I use it. I simply do not claim it is ancient, and I do not use it as evidence for anything about pre-Christian practice.

The Scottish position

Scotland has its own plant meanings, and they are not the same thing at all. They are not a code. They are attached to use, to place, to season and to prohibition, and they are far more concerned with protection and with the dead than with romantic messaging.

  • Rowan, protection against witchcraft and the evil eye. Not a sentiment, a function.
  • Heather, and the white heather that carries luck, which is itself a nineteenth century Victorian addition to a much older plant.
  • Thistle, national, and later.
  • Bog myrtle, moorland, and used.
  • Elder, approached with caution and asked before cutting.

The difference in kind is worth stating plainly. Floriography tells you what a flower says. The Scottish tradition tells you what a plant does. The second is a materially different relationship, and it is the one this site is built on.

Roy Vickery's Folk Flora and his free Plant-Lore archive are the place to go for the British and Irish material, because they record what people actually said and did, with names, places and dates attached, rather than what a dictionary asserts.

Using it well

  • Say where it comes from. In Victorian floriography is four words and it costs you nothing.
  • Pick one dictionary and stay in it. Since they contradict each other, internal consistency is the only coherence available. Kate Greenaway's 1884 Language of Flowers is the most reproduced and the most likely to be shared by whoever receives your bouquet.
  • Do not mix registers. Floriography meaning and folk-practical use are different systems answering different questions. Keep them in separate columns of your notes, and separate columns of your database.
  • Use it where a shared code is the point. A funeral wreath, a wedding, a gift, a piece of design work. Anywhere the meaning is meant to be read by another person, a well-known nineteenth century convention is exactly the right tool.
  • Do not use it for correspondences in a working. If you are choosing a plant for a purpose, choose on what the plant is and does, not on what a Parisian publisher decided in 1819.

Sources

  • de la Tour, C. (1819). Le Langage des Fleurs. Paris. Available via Internet Archive and Gallica.
  • Greenaway, K. (1884). Language of Flowers. Routledge. Full text on Project Gutenberg.
  • Tyas, R. (1869). The Language of Flowers; or, Floral Emblems of Thoughts, Feelings, and Sentiments. Project Gutenberg.
  • Montagu, M. W. (1763). Turkish Embassy Letters, for the sélam material and how it reached English readers. Project Gutenberg.
  • Seaton, B. (1995). The Language of Flowers: A History. University Press of Virginia. The scholarly account, and the book that establishes the contradictions between dictionaries.
  • Shakespeare, W. Hamlet, IV.v, for rosemary and rue in genuine early modern usage.
  • Vickery, R. (2019). Vickery's Folk Flora. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Free companion archive: Plant-Lore.
  • Milliken, W. & Bridgewater, S. (2004). Flora Celtica: Plants and People in Scotland. Birlinn.
  • Grieve, M. (1931). A Modern Herbal. Full text.
  • Hobsbawm, E. & Ranger, T. (eds.) (1983). The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge University Press. For the general mechanism described in this article.

Related: [How to Read an Esoteric Claim]; [Liminal Plants]; [Roots and Substitutions]