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Love, Friendship and More- The Secret Meaning of Flowers For Valentine’s Day
Send your sweetheart a secret message- in flowers!
The Victorians were especially fascinated with the secret meaning of flowers.
Flowers have held significant meanings and conveyed coded messages for centuries. Unlike these days of texting and sliding into DM’s, social convention imposed severe restrictions on what could be expressed directly.
To get around social norms, people used flowers to flirt and send secret messages. ‘Le Langage des Fleurs’, the first dictionary to explain the meanings behind various flowers, was published in 1819 in Paris. This code became extremely popular with the middle and upper classes of Victorian society, who were bound by strict etiquette.
Floriography, or the language of flowers, has impacted the arts since the Victorian era. Floriography has also played its part on occasions such as the royal wedding between Kate Middleton and Prince William, when the bride’s bouquet held very special and important meanings: lily of the valley to symbolise trustworthiness and the return of happiness; sweet William to represent gallantry (as well as sharing the name of her husband-to-be); hyacinth to show the constancy of love; and finally myrtle, representing love and marriage, which has been part of royal wedding tradition since Queen Victoria’s reign, with sprigs of myrtle grown in the garden at Osborne, the former royal residence on the Isle of Wight, included in the bridal bouquet.
Learning the special symbolism of flowers became a popular pastime during the 1800s. Nearly all Victorian homes had, alongside the Bible, guidebooks for deciphering the “language,” although definitions shifted depending on the source.
Following the protocol of Victorian-era etiquette, flowers were primarily used to deliver messages that couldn’t be spoken aloud. In a sort of silent dialogue, flowers could be used to answer “yes” or “no” questions. A “yes” answer came in the form of flowers handed over with the right hand; if the left hand was used, the answer was “no.”
