Say it with flowers
A floral bouquet provides a display of rich colour that brings comfort and cheer, but each type of bloom can also convey a deeper meaning
Flowers have long been celebrated for their beauty and medicinal properties across cultures in Asia, Africa and Europe. From English and Japanese folklore to Christian and Buddhist teachings, specific blooms are imbued with deep symbolism and cultural relevance. Floriography, the practice of attaching meaning to flowers as a way of conveying feelings and messages, took root during the Ottoman Empire in the 1600s. The women of Constantinople’s harems had a playful tradition known as selam, a mnemonic system that linked phrases to rhyming words. Some were the names of flowers and plants, which inspired their use as a kind of coded language. Eventually, with the growing interest in botany and the 1819 publication in Paris of Charlotte de la Tour’s Le Language des Fleurs, an encyclopaedia of flowers and their meanings, floriography became popular throughout Europe and was especially fashionable in Victorian England and America.