Welcome to the Summer 1998 On-Line Edition of

St George's News

Waterlooville's Parish Magazine

GARDEN GOSSIP

Do you talk to your flowers? Some people do, and they say the plants respond. Speak kindly, and the plants grow. Say nasty things and they fade away. I must admit that I do, occasionally ˜ like when I have just planted something, and I am tempted to say something like 'I have planted you to the best of my ability. Now it is up to you. You have two choices. You can either grow ˜ or die.' Not once have they answered, so I don't know if they understand. But I have a little book entitled The Language of Flowers. It was first published in 1820 (no, mine is not a first edition), but was in use hundreds of years before that. It is not so much a language as a 'Floral Code', because flowers are used as symbols to pass on a message in the same way as Morse uses symbols to represent letters of the alphabet. This Floral Code, it seems, began in the Ottoman Empire, a culture where a boy and a girl could not freely be left alone to talk about things that lovers do. So it was left to the flowers to do the talking. A young suitor knew that if his loved one carried or wore a grape hyacinth it meant 'Yes', but, under the same circumstances, an iris meant 'No'. A certain Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who was living in Constantinople in 1718, was intrigued by this and sent a letter to a friend in England containing all the details of this strange but delightful method of communication. After her death her letters were published, and a language of flowers caught the imagination of those who read her correspondence. But it wasn't until the publication of the little book in 1820 that it really caught on. It was quickly followed by other floral dictionaries. Now this was a time when progressive young ladies were looking for accomplishments outside the home ˜ learning household skills was not enough. The idea of learning the Floral Code, which entailed the recognition of all the plants involved and remembering their meaning, offered such a challenge. Not only that, it provided a way of passing messages in secret in the days when no girl could be allowed to be in the company of a man without a chaperone, and the telephone hadn't been invented.

The code was quite simple to operate. A posy or a single flower was given. The recipient answered 'Yes' by touching the flowers with her lips and 'No' by pulling off a petal. As a reply to an earlier message the giving of an antirrhinum also meant 'No'. Most of the common flowers had simple and clear cut meanings. A double rose meant 'love' and sweet violets denoted 'modesty'. A bunch of tulips carried the message 'I love you'. However, not all messages conveyed by flowers were kind or loving. Narcissi accused the recipient of conceit and foxgloves of insincerity, and a lettuce (I know its hard to believe anyone would give a lettuce ˜ unless he was a greengrocer) charged the receiver with cold-heartedness.

The language was complex (my little book gives the meanings of over seven hundred flowers), and was also very confusing as not all the dictionaries that appeared were consistent over the interpretation of the flowers. A peony, for instance would mean 'shame' if you looked in one book and 'shyness' if you looked in another. And lavender could mean either 'pleasant memories' or 'distrust'. Not only that, quite a bit of botanical knowledge was required. I have heard it said 'A rose is a rose is a rose' as an indication that two things are really the same. But not true in the Language of Flowers. You had to know your roses. The European Sweet Briar meant 'I wound to heal' and the American Sweet Briar indicated 'simplicity'. A yellow rose meant 'I don't love you as much as I used to'. A musk rose usually signified 'capricious beauty' while a moss rose 'voluptuousness'. There were over thirty different messages that could be given using only roses. There was always a good chance of getting it wrong, and there must have been plenty of misunderstandings, especially when a flower bent to the left indicated 'You' and to the right meant 'I'. It looks as if it could form the basis of the plot of a romantic novel.

Anyway, the use of the Floral Code died out during the 14-18 war, when the freedom of the sexes to mix without being watched meant there was no need for a secret code born out of the intrigues of the harems of the Ottoman Empire. But remember, whenever you give anyone a flower or a bunch of flowers, you may be saying something you don't really mean.

Happy Gardening.

written by Bill Hutchings

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