Language of Flowers: Victorian Floriography and Symbolic Communication

When a Victorian woman received a small bouquet of red roses, forget-me-nots, and rosemary, she did not simply see flowers. She read a message: passionate love, the promise of remembrance, the declaration of fidelity. For much of the nineteenth century, flowers were a language, and the men and women who spoke it could conduct entire conversations in petals and stems, saying with a carefully compos...