Victorians sent coded messages in bouquets, and even the hand that gave them mattered
A Victorian suitor could propose without saying a word, and be refused the same way. Flowers handed over with the right hand meant yes; with the left, no. Where a woman pinned a posy mattered too: at her cleavage it signalled mere friendship, over her heart an unmistakable declaration of love.
Giving flowers meaning is ancient and widespread, but the European craze traces back to the Ottoman court. There, from the 14th century, a custom called selam, known in Europe as Turkish love letters, wrapped objects such as flowers, pearls or locks of hair in a handkerchief. Each object's name rhymed with a word, and the recipient decoded them one by one into a verse. The writer Mary Wortley Montagu brought the fashion to England in 1718 after her travels to Constantinople.
Publishing turned it into a system. A symbolic list of flowers appeared in 1809, and in 1819 Louise Cortambert, writing as Madame Charlotte de la Tour, produced the first full dictionary of floriography. Dozens of rivals followed on both sides of the Atlantic, including American books from 1829 onward. Armed with them, Victorians exchanged small talking bouquets called nosegays or tussie-mussies. These had started as fragrant bundles of lavender, lemon balm and roses, carried to mask the stink of streets and unwashed bodies, and they survive today as corsages and buttonholes.
Many meanings came from the plants themselves. The mimosa, whose leaves fold shut at night or when touched, stood for chastity. Red roses signified passionate love, pink a milder affection, white virtue, and yellow friendship. Details such as which side a ribbon was tied on decided whether a message referred to the giver or the receiver. With hundreds of dictionaries disagreeing, though, most flowers carried several possible meanings.
Writers have long spoken this language. In Hamlet, Ophelia hands out rosemary, pansies, fennel and rue, each with its own significance, and laments that the violets withered when her father died. Painters used it too: the lily in Leonardo da Vinci's Annunciation signals the Virgin's purity, while Dutch still lifes of the 17th century showed drooping blooms beside riches as reminders that life is brief. Japan has its own tradition, hanakotoba.
Source: Language of flowers
