The language of flowers, and which ones meant death

Floriography is the nineteenth century habit of assigning meanings to flowers, and most of what is said about it is half true. The dictionaries existed, in enormous numbers. The secret courtships conducted through them are largely a later invention, because no two books agreed and a code nobody shares is not a code. What survives is more interesting than the myth: a stable core of plants that stood for grief, a short and blunter list that stood for death itself, and a separate body of funeral custom that still works today without any book at all.

Where the idea actually came from

The usual origin story points to letters written from Constantinople in 1718, which described a Turkish game called selam in which small objects were sent as messages. The practice was real and the description is genuine, but it did not work the way later readers assumed. In selam an object stood in for a line of verse because its name rhymed with the line. A pear was not a symbol of anything. It rhymed.

The flower dictionary proper is French and it is nineteenth century. Le Langage des Fleurs, published in Paris in 1819 under the name Charlotte de Latour, laid out an alphabetical list of plants with assigned sentiments, and it sold well enough to be copied for the next eighty years. English and American editions followed, each one adding, cutting and rearranging. The best known illustrated version, Kate Greenaway's Language of Flowers, appeared in 1884, by which point the fashion was already old.

So the chronology is worth keeping straight. The idea arrives from Paris as a publishing product rather than from the Ottoman court as a cipher, and it arrives at the start of the century rather than in the mourning-heavy decades it is usually attached to.

Why it did not work as a code

Compare two of these books and the problem is immediate. Marigold means grief in one list, sacred affection in another and cruelty in a third. A poppy is consolation here and eternal sleep there. Lists were padded out by compilers who needed entries, and a meaning invented to fill a page looks identical in print to one with four centuries behind it.

A code needs both parties to hold the same key. For a bouquet to say anything precise, sender and recipient had to own the same edition, and the editions were not standardised. Go looking for evidence of flower messages being exchanged and you find a great deal of fiction, etiquette writing and gift books describing the practice, and very little surviving correspondence doing it.

The honest reading is that floriography was a parlour amusement and a successful kind of present. That does not make the meanings worthless. It makes them a shared decorative vocabulary rather than a private language, which is how ornament usually works anyway.

The flowers that stood for mourning

Across most editions a consistent core shows up, and it is consistent because it was already old. Cypress is the strongest: planted in Mediterranean burial grounds since antiquity, and given as mourning or death in nearly every book. Yew does the same job in English churchyards. Willow, usually weeping willow, means mourning, and it is the motif carved on gravestones once the skull went out of fashion.

Rosemary is remembrance, and that one predates the dictionaries by centuries. It was carried at funerals and dropped into the grave in early modern England, which is why it needed no explaining. Forget-me-not explains itself. Ivy, which is planted on graves and climbs over them, stands for attachment that outlasts the person.

Then the everlastings. Amaranth means immortality because the flower holds its colour when dried. Helichrysum, sold as immortelle, was wired into wreaths for French graves for the same reason. These are the only entries where the meaning comes from the plant's behaviour rather than from a compiler's taste, which is probably why they stuck.

The ones that meant death as a threat

A separate and much blunter group turns up in the longer dictionaries, and every member of it is poisonous. Hemlock is given as you will be my death. Monkshood, which is aconite, means a deadly foe is near. Deadly nightshade means silence or falsehood depending on the edition. Henbane, where it appears at all, means imperfection or death.

This is the most reliable part of the whole system, because the meaning is not symbolic. These plants kill people. A reader in 1850 knew monkshood from the gardening press as the thing you did not let children near, and no dictionary had to do any persuading.

It also explains the shape of the system. There are forty ways to say affection and only a handful of plants that can stand for an actual threat, which is why the dark end of floriography is so much more specific than the sentimental end.

The funeral flowers that still mean something

Outside the books there is a parallel system that is still live, and it is the one to know if you are sending flowers to a real person. In France, Italy, Poland and much of Catholic Europe the chrysanthemum is the grave flower, bought by the million for All Saints' Day, and arriving at a dinner with a pot of them is a well known mistake.

In Japan, Korea and China white chrysanthemums carry the same funeral weight, and white flowers in general read as mourning rather than as a neutral choice. In Mexico the marigold is the flower of the Day of the Dead, scattered in paths to the grave. In Hindu rites marigolds are everywhere, at weddings as much as at cremations, so one flower is festive and funerary depending on where you are standing.

None of this came out of a Victorian dictionary. It came from what grows locally and when it flowers, which is a better reason for a symbol than a publisher's deadline.

What this leaves if you like the imagery

The usable part is the vocabulary of dried and evergreen material, because that is the part that was never arbitrary. A wreath is a ring with no beginning, made of something that does not wither, and it was a funerary and honorific form in Greece and Rome long before it was a Christmas one. A wreath of bare black branches is the same idea with the evergreen removed, which reads as a deliberate move rather than a contradiction.

The rose is the other survivor, and it is overloaded: love in every edition, but also the flower on mourning cards and headstones, and a cut flower is a dying one by definition. That is why a rose works better in metal than in glass. A rose cast in silver holds the form at the point just before it goes over, and a brass rose pressed into warm wax does the same thing to a letter.

Use the meanings the way they were actually used: as ornament that a reader can half recognise, not as a message you expect anyone to decode.

Questions people actually ask

What flower means death?

Cypress, in nearly every Victorian flower dictionary, with yew and weeping willow close behind. In living custom the answer is regional: the chrysanthemum is the grave flower across much of Catholic Europe and in Japan, Korea and China.

Was the Victorian language of flowers a real secret code?

Not a working one. Dozens of dictionaries were published and they contradicted each other, so a bouquet could only be read by somebody holding the same edition. It was a popular genre of gift book and a loose decorative vocabulary.

Which flowers mean remembrance?

Rosemary and forget-me-not. Both predate the dictionaries: rosemary was carried at English funerals and thrown into the grave centuries before anyone compiled a list of meanings.

What does a wreath actually symbolise?

A closed ring made of material that does not wither. Wreaths were funerary and honorific in Greece and Rome long before they became a December decoration, and the evergreen is the whole point of the form.