A Brief Overview of Floriography

With Valentine’s Day coming up, the iconic red rose prepares for its biggest day of the year. In 2022 alone, around 250 million roses were produced for the amorous holiday (that’s more than the populations of Canada, the UK, and Mexico combined). Red roses signify undying love in cultures around the world, and the rose is the most popular flower grown globally.

However, the rose is not a symbol of love everywhere. In China, flowers are traditionally only given at funerals or in times of mourning. In Catalonia, roses are gifted during the Feast of Saint George, to commemorate their patron saint who slew a dragon and watched a rose come from its blood. Needless to say, flowers have a language of their own, which can differ across the map.

While this tradition has mostly died out, in the 1800s, floriography was all the rage. Floriography, literally the language of flowers, can be attributed to a dogmatic love for tulips in Constantinople. This tulipmania was noticed by English aristocrat and poet, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, while on an extended visit to the Ottoman Empire. She brought this idea back to Europe, where flower language began to take shape and expand.

In 1819 the first official dictionary of floriography, Le langage des Fleurs, was published in French by Louise Cortambert.

Flowers came to be associated with a plethora of different definitions, depending on the situation in which they were used. Common meanings slowly began to emerge, and Victorian England jumped on the new language to send each other floral messages that could not be said aloud. Flowers were popularly written about in Shakespeare plays and by Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters.

According to The Illustrated Language of Flowers by Anna Christian Burke, published in 1856, flowers in different life stages could take on different meanings. The younger stage of an almond plant flower meant hope, while a fully grown almond flower was associated with stupidity. Daisies grown in gardens signified a sharing of sentiments, while the wild daisy was more akin to “I’ll think about it.” Colors, too, carried different explanations. A white lilac brought to mind innocence, while purple ones coveted feelings of first love. Bouquets could combine several ideas or phrases together, and be gifted as a sort of message or poem to the recipient.

While more specific flower languages may be a thing of the past, the love affair with the sweet flower as a gift to a loved one still burns passionately bright.

On a not quite as romantic note, rose farms tend to consume large amounts of water and energy, and droughts exacerbated by climate change may threaten their supply in the coming years. Kenya, a large global exporter of roses, dedicates much of their scant water supply to growing them. More sustainable farming and water conservation practices can be implemented to address this problem, but locally harvested roses (and all other flowers!) are kinder on the environment. Whether this means shopping locally or growing your own, Valentine’s Day flowers can take on a more climate-conscious and personal touch.

The Delight Flower Farm in Champaign is a local, woman-owned flower farm that claims to be sustainable and often sells their cut flora at Urbana’s Market in the Square. They also sell bouquets at Harvest Market, the Common Ground Food Cooperative, County Market on West Kirby, and the Rose Bowl Tavern. Their flowers can last for several weeks, as they are often sold the same day they’re picked to ensure freshness, and are grown without herbicides and pesticides. Roses may be red, and violets may be blue, but if your valentine is an environmentalist, you know what they’ll value!