When Flowers Carried Messages—and No Two Dictionaries Quite Agreed

Imagine receiving a small bouquet with no card. A red rose, perhaps, a sprig of ivy, and a flower you cannot identify. Is it a declaration of love? Friendship? A warning? Or simply whatever looked good at the market that morning?

In the nineteenth century, some people would have reached for a book before reaching for a vase. During the Victorian era, guides to the “language of flowers” turned bouquets into a playful vocabulary of feeling. A flower could stand for affection, friendship, preference, disdain, hope, or a request. The custom sounds wonderfully tidy—until you open more than one guide and discover that the dictionaries did not always agree.

That small complication is what makes the tradition so useful for memory keepers. A flower’s meaning was not always a universal fact waiting to be decoded. Often, it was a meaning supplied by a particular book, family, community, or moment. The real memory may be less “this flower always meant X” and more “Grandmother chose this flower every spring, and this is what it meant in our house.”

A popular nineteenth-century pastime

Smithsonian Gardens describes the language of flowers as a popular nineteenth-century pastime. Guidebooks assigned meanings to individual flowers and sometimes to colours, arrangements, or the way a bouquet was presented. The idea appealed to people who wanted to express feelings indirectly, especially in a culture where open declarations could be restricted by etiquette.

The practice was connected to fashion as well as romance. Victorian women carried small bouquets called tussie-mussies or nosegays at dinners, concerts, and balls. Special holders helped keep the flowers fresh and allowed a bouquet to become part of an outfit. Some holders even had rings or chains so they could be carried while dancing.

Flowers were not only decoration. A carefully chosen posy could be a gift, an accessory, a conversation starter, and—at least in theory—a message. Smithsonian Gardens gives examples recorded in its educational materials: a rose could suggest devotion, an apple blossom preference, a yellow carnation disdain, and straw a request for union. The examples are charming partly because they sound like a tiny Victorian text-message system, complete with the possibility of a very awkward reply.

But we should be careful with the word “system.”

The code was never quite universal

Smithsonian Gardens makes an important qualification: the guides often differed from one another, and the language of flowers was likely more of a fashionable enthusiasm than a standardized method of communication. Its example of the white rose is particularly helpful. One nineteenth-century book assigned it the meaning “I would be single,” while another gave it “I am worthy of you.” If the flower wilted, its meaning could change again.

The Royal Horticultural Society likewise presents the language of flowers as a historical tradition shaped by books, literature, and changing interpretations. The RHS points readers toward the work of Brent Elliott on the Victorian language of flowers and notes that meanings developed through a mixture of cultural associations rather than one official floral dictionary.

Cornell University Library’s digital collection makes that variety visible. Its Language of Flowers collection contains digital copies of 92 rare texts about expressing emotions, sentiments, and moral lessons through flowers, dating from the early nineteenth century into the 1950s. A collection like this does not give us one final answer. It lets us compare the answers people actually encountered.

That is a valuable distinction when writing family history. A source can tell us what a book printed. It cannot automatically tell us what every person believed, or whether a particular bouquet was assembled according to the book at all.

A book, a bouquet, and a little uncertainty

The Library of Congress preserves an 1885 item titled The Language of Flowers. Its existence is evidence that the subject had entered popular print culture. It is not evidence that every person who exchanged flowers used the same meanings.

This is the sort of distinction that keeps a light historical story honest. We can say that nineteenth-century flower guides circulated and that people used floral symbolism in literature, fashion, and gift-giving. We can say that some flowers acquired recurring associations. We should be slower to claim that a suitor could send a perfectly precise sentence by arranging six blossoms in a particular order.

The old books resemble a collection of family phrasebooks. One household may use a particular expression for years; another household hears the same words and wonders what on earth they mean. A bouquet could work the same way. Its meaning depended on the guide someone had read, the local custom someone had inherited, and the relationship between giver and recipient.

In other words, the most important part of the message may have been shared context.

How a flower becomes a family memory

Many families have a flower that is more than a plant. It may be the lilac beside a first home, the peonies a parent grew, the roses someone carried at a wedding, or the marigolds planted every year after a move. The family meaning might never have appeared in a Victorian dictionary. That does not make it less real or less worth preserving.

Try asking an older relative about one flower with a specific history. Avoid beginning with “What does this flower symbolize?” That question can send the conversation toward a generic answer. Ask instead:

• Who first grew or gave you this flower?
• Where were you when you remember seeing it?
• Was it connected with a celebration, a goodbye, a garden, or an ordinary routine?
• Did anyone in the family have a name for it?
• Did its meaning change over time?

The answers may surprise you. A flower remembered as a symbol of romance may actually bring back a neighbour who shared cuttings. A rose associated with a wedding may lead to a story about the aunt who arranged the bouquet in a kitchen sink. A small pot of violets may open a memory of a school uniform, a rented flat, or a train journey home.

The object is not to force the memory into a perfect story. It is to preserve the connections that a catalogue cannot provide: who was there, what the room looked like, what people called the flower, and what the family understood without explaining it.

Make your own family flower dictionary

You can turn the conversation into a simple memory project. Choose five flowers that recur in your family photographs, gardens, recipes, celebrations, or stories. For each one, record the ordinary name, any regional or family name, the person associated with it, a place, an approximate date, and the story attached to it.

Leave room for disagreement. One person may remember that the lilacs grew at the back door; another may insist they were beside the fence. Those differences do not necessarily weaken the family record. They show that memory is made of viewpoints as well as facts. Note what is agreed, what is uncertain, and what you may be able to check in a photograph, letter, seed packet, garden journal, or old address.

If you find a family photograph with flowers in it, do not assume the arrangement tells you a fixed symbolic message. Ask what else might be happening. Was the photograph taken at a wedding, a funeral, a graduation, a church event, or simply in the garden? Who chose the flowers? Were they bought, grown, borrowed, or gathered? The answers are often more revealing than a list of flower meanings.

You might even make a small modern bouquet with your own household’s definitions. Let one flower mean “thank you for showing up,” another mean “this reminds me of home,” and a third mean “please tell me that story again.” Write the key down. Future readers will appreciate the explanation—and may be amused that your code is finally standardized.

Save the story behind the symbol

The Victorian language of flowers is a delightful reminder that people have always tried to carry feeling through ordinary objects. It is also a reminder to label our evidence carefully. A guidebook can preserve a historical association. A family interview can preserve what a particular flower meant to particular people. Neither should be quietly substituted for the other.

Your story may not involve a secret bouquet or a Victorian dance. It may be a hydrangea outside a first apartment, a rose pressed between book pages, or the smell of a neighbour’s garden on the walk to school. Record the name, place, people, and uncertainty while they are still available. Your story matters to us.

What flower carries a family memory in your home—and who could explain why?

Sources and further reading

• Smithsonian Gardens: Language of Flowers
• Smithsonian Gardens: Floral Fashions—From Bouquets to Buttonholes
• Cornell University Library: Language of Flowers Collection
• Library of Congress: The Language of flowers (1885)
• Royal Horticultural Society: The language of flowers