Floriography - The Secret Language of Flowers

Red roses. Valentine’s Day. Floral messaging that has no room for manoeuvre or misconstrue. Important, perhaps becasue our February 14th intentions need to be absolutely legible. Our designs and desires must have clarity and meaning. The red rose then, is a comfortably predictable symbol, bought and sold by the dozen. In fact, 250 million red roses are produced globally, for this day alone. Beautiful, classic, fully unmistakable. Even if we feel that a red rose is actually strangely blunt for something as nuanced as romantic love, it is a symbol of deep affection that is so well established and so well understood, that it is inconceivable that alternatives should even be discussed. So let's not go there...

Before Valentine’s Day was reduced to a single, floral headline, there existed an entire botanical vocabulary beneath it - an intricate, coded system of meaning known as floriography: the language of flowers.

In every culture, across the entirety of human history, flowers have been central to the human experience. That rich tapestry would take weeks to write about, so let's just paddle around the pool of our "modern" fascination, which really began right here in France, with a book published in 1819, under the pseudonym Charlotte de la Tour, called "La langage des fleurs". It laid out over 300 meanings for particular plants and flowers, to be used as a "message in a bouquet". By the time that this early work was translated into English, other British and American exponents of the floral arts, had laid out their own versions, bringing some of their own sources and personal preferences to the trend.

The starchy Victorians of 19th century England, can hardly be considered the most risqué of our ancestral peeps. Their formality, prudishness and not-even-borderline puritanical public behaviour was rooted in the soil of sudden economic change, moral ideaology and social signalling. This, all seasoned with serious cultural anxieties, along with everything Jane Austen ever wrote, have familiarised us with the Victorian norms around modesty, decency and restraint.

The Victorians were seemingly unable to say anything outright. Everything remotely emotional had to be suggested, rather than stated. So how perfect that floriography presented itself as a form of sentimental encryption - a way of subtely and secretly communicating through the enigmatic medium of the village florist.

Clearly, species was important to this language. So was colour, arrangement, even the angle at which they were offered. Where direct declarations were either discouraged, improper or just plain impossible to contemplate, flowers became the language of confession, desire and longing. Even a way to deliver a rejection of unwanted advances could be nuanced through nature, all without a word being spoken. Romantic restraint at its finest. Morse code in bloom.

But like any form of communication, meanings were ascribed by one book and changed in another. Victorian systems were so couched in basic avoidance, that they became too elaborate for modern life. Floriography was expressive, but it was also complicated. Meanings varied between experts, regions, books - even social circles. A hydrangea might mean heartlessness in one dictionary and gratitude in another. Birdsfoot trefoil, rather wonderfully, meant revenge. Basil could mean hatred, or not. Dill could mean lust. Really? On my smoked salmon?..

Even literature played along. Charlotte Brontë, in Jane Eyre, used floral references that subtly mirrored the emotions of our swoony Victorian ancestors : snowdrops for hope, crocuses for cheerfulness, pansies for thoughtfulness. It all seems a bit seasonal to me.. I mean giving someone a bunch of daffodils, was supposed to signify "a bright new beginning to the love we share, after a time of personal hardship"... well if that sentiment becomes relevant in July, good luck finding daffodils.

So the red rose endures perhaps through its universal simplicity. Totally legible, now available in stores all year long, but especially in February, when we need them the most. It is the acceptable face of an emotional shortcut. Efficinet, familiar and easy to understand. No wonder we have embraced the red rose as a symbol of our collective love with such eagerness. They are safe, grand-looking, and reassuringly expensive (at €9.50 a stem in our local flower shop..).

So red roses present no red flag, but they do reveal something about what we may have lost.

The emotional complexity of floriography perhaps belonged to a world that understood that emotion is layered and that our red, red roses don't have to be the sole standard bearer. But hey, who doesn't love a bunch of red roses. I have no idea, as I have never received one. But it's not the flowers that matter, because they well might. But what else could we say with flowers, if we had just remembered the rest of their quirky, secret language.