The Language of Flowers: When Replies Came as Bouquets

Victorian floriography was the practice of assigning meanings to flowers, so that a bloom could suggest affection, refusal or a less friendly thought. The dictionaries disagreed. A bouquet could only carry a precise message if its sender and recipient happened to use the same book.

That makes the language of flowers less like a secret universal code and more like a group chat where everyone has installed a different emoji keyboard. A red rose was an easy guess. The further a florist went into rare blooms, colours and presentation rules, the more a supposed message depended on a particular printed guide.

A dictionary for the bouquet

English Heritage identifies Henry Phillips's Floral Emblems of 1825 as an early English book on the subject. Phillips drew on earlier literature and his own imagination. Other writers followed, giving more plants more meanings. The Royal Horticultural Society notes that by 1869 John Ingram's Flora Symbolica was gathering meanings from several sources. That is not what a tidy, standardised code looks like. It is what a publishing fashion looks like.

The appeal is obvious. Flowers were already given as gifts. Attach a meaning to each one, and an ordinary posy becomes a note that can be handed over without saying the difficult thing aloud. The gift still looks like a gift to everyone else in the room. The sender can feel wonderfully subtle, provided the recipient owns the matching dictionary and wants to play.

English Heritage is careful here: the books were popular, and flower symbolism appeared in literature, but there is little firm evidence that people routinely engineered bouquets to deliver exact sentences. The romantic code in a novel is not proof of a widespread real-life postal system made of stems.

Smithsonian Gardens takes a more confident view in its exhibition on Victorian bouquet holders: it describes carefully chosen flowers conveying messages during courtship. English Heritage is more cautious about evidence for exact private sentences. Both institutions document the books and the flowers. They differ in how far they will take the claim about decoding a particular bouquet. A meaning could be part of a gift, a fashion accessory or a parlour game without every posy becoming a private telegram.

A rose with four possible jobs

The dictionaries do not always agree even on the familiar flowers. English Heritage gives the white rose as an example: depending on the writer, it could stand for innocence, silence, a holy death or someone being worthy of another person. Imagine sending one with the confidence of a man who thinks his reply under her holiday photo is unambiguous. The receiver may be reading a different book entirely.

Then the rules multiplied. The RHS describes mid-century guides in which the way a flower was presented could change its meaning. Its example is a ranunculus whose tilt shifts a compliment into an insult about vanity. A botched angle becomes a social problem. A florist with unsteady hands could start an argument that neither party intended.

Some entries were plainly not romantic. English Heritage lists the striped carnation as a refusal and the yellow rose as a sign of fading affection or unfaithfulness in some schemes. Its account of Phillips even notes his warning to think before offering a striped carnation. The warning assumes sender and receiver will both recognise the symbol. That is a lot of faith to place in a petal.

The message still needed consent

What remains interesting is the desire for an indirect reply. Someone had a feeling, feared saying it plainly and reached for a token that might carry the awkwardness for them. The fan language took the same wish and gave it an even less reliable mechanism. The escort card at least printed the question and the possible refusal in words.

A bouquet can be lovely without being a cipher. A person may accept the flowers and decline the message somebody imagined hidden inside them. That gap between what the sender intends and what the receiver owes him also appears in unwanted public replies. The medium need not be digital for an elaborate private meaning to land in somebody else's lap.

There is also a practical joke in the dictionary itself: the more specific its entry, the more confident it sounds. But specificity is no guarantee that the other reader learned the same definition. If a message matters, relying on a flower whose meaning changes between books is a brave way to avoid writing one clear sentence.

The flower could mean devotion. It could also mean she likes flowers.