Short Stuff: Victorian Flower Language

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Speaker 2 Hey and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and that's all that needs mentioning today because it's just us.
So this is short stuff.

Speaker 3 That's right. And by the way, I wanted to thank you for sending over that beautiful

Speaker 3 nosegay of wilted white roses delivered upside down with a ribbon to the left.

Speaker 2 Well, may I ask where on your chest are you wearing it?

Speaker 3 Near my bodice.

Speaker 2 In the center?

Speaker 2 Right in the center, baby. Oh, well, I guess we're good friends then.
I can live with that.

Speaker 2 Although, I'm not sure what I was saying with the whole thing. It's kind of.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I'd have to get out a code decoder book or whatever.

Speaker 2 Well, they had those, Chuck. What we're talking about is florography.
And there were a lot of florography books because it turns out fluoreography was a huge deal. in the Victorian and Regency areas.

Speaker 2 I guess between a couple of decades on either side of the 19th and 20th century divide, the DMZ of those centuries, as it were,

Speaker 2 it was really popular to send unspoken messages using flowers.

Speaker 3 That's right.

Speaker 3 Unspoken because at the time in the UK and parts of the U.S., obviously in Europe, in certain high societies mainly,

Speaker 3 you could not speak these things aloud a lot of times. It was untoward.
So you had to have a coded way of talking to each other.

Speaker 3 And if you're thinking like, oh yeah, you send flowers to someone and that means something,

Speaker 3 it goes deep. I mean, it is literally a code.
And that's what I was kind of referring to with the upside down and the wilted and where the ribbon's tied. Like all that stuff means something.

Speaker 2 It does. Yeah.
It is quite deep. And you can send quite complex messages.
And we'll kind of show what we're talking about. But first, I want to shout out some great sources that helped with this.

Speaker 2 Farmer's Almanac, the Iowa State University Extension, Petal Republic, it's a great name, Author Sarah on Substack,

Speaker 2 Clive Rose, Georgina Garden Center, Thursday, just the D,

Speaker 2 Flower Meaning, and Historical Holly all helped with this. So thanks to all of you.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's wonderful. So this is nothing new,

Speaker 3 or was nothing new back then.

Speaker 3 Coded Messages Through Flowers goes back to the 1600s, at least in the Ottoman Empire, when they had a tradition called Selim or selem, S-E-L-A-M, which was a game where between the members of the harem of Constantinople, where they would send flowers attached with like rhymes and meanings and stuff like that to communicate with one another.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Which made sense because a lot of them couldn't read or write, so flowers did the talk in forum. And this actually spread from the Ottoman Empire to

Speaker 2 Europe via one single person, a British aristocrat who is married to the British ambassador to Turkey. Her name was Lady Mary Wortley.

Speaker 2 And she would send back letters to friends and family describing all of the new and exotic customs of this land that she had moved to. She moved to Constantinople.

Speaker 2 And among them was a description of Selam or Selam. Selim.

Speaker 2 How did you say it?

Speaker 3 I said Selim or Selim. I'm not sure if it's a long or shorty.

Speaker 2 Well, the flower code that the harem workers had come up with. She wrote a letter about that, and somebody got it and said, this is great.
I want to tell everybody in the UK about it.

Speaker 3 That's right.

Speaker 3 And by the way, I mentioned a couple of puns in the Operation Paul Bunyan episode. Which one were you thinking? Because you said you remembered one.

Speaker 2 The code stems back.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that was one.

Speaker 2 That's the only one I can think of.

Speaker 3 Well, no, here's the other one. Botany was a growing field.

Speaker 2 How did I miss that? My

Speaker 2 pun sensor is covered with dirt.

Speaker 3 Well, no, that's good. You want to pack some mud on that thing.

Speaker 2 I know, but I don't like walking past stuff. I like to take part, you know, be involved in the mix.

Speaker 3 So botany was a growing field.

Speaker 3 And floriography was, like I said, among certain classes, you know, mainly upper-class women because, you know, it wasn't like the kind of thing that you could really talk about openly in that class.

Speaker 3 And this is one thing I haven't seen Emily yet today because she got out of the house early, but I wanted to ask her because she's, you know, like a lot of Gen X women are obsessed with Jane Austen stuff and sense and sensibility and all those

Speaker 3 series and movies and books.

Speaker 3 And I wondered if she knew about this or if they in those, because I've never watched any of them, if they were kind of pointed stuff out like, oh, he sent the flowers this way and that means this.

Speaker 2 But that's, I mean, that's the Brownie sisters and Jane Austen used a lot of florography to help kind of develop their characters, which I guess they did. So I guess they did.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they definitely did. And the readers at the time probably would have picked up on this, but florography is it's become so arcane and obscure that modern readers would not pick up on it.

Speaker 2 But if you learn about floriography and you start reading Jane Austen, apparently it'll show up.

Speaker 3 Oh, well, no, that's what I was wondering. If in the books they said, like, oh, Willie sent an upside-down thing, which means blah, blah, blah.
Yes.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 they would do that. I found a quote from Pride and Prejudice from Jane Austen.

Speaker 3 Ooh, can you read it in character?

Speaker 2 Well, it's the narrator.

Speaker 2 So, sure, I guess I can because the narrator sounds exactly like me. Yeah.
But Elizabeth Bennett is giving a flower to Mr. Darcy.
And the

Speaker 2 narrator describes, she gave a red rose to tell him that she loved him. Red rose.
Red, red, red, red, red. Rose, rose, rose.
Red, red, rose, red. Rose red, rose, red, red, red, red.

Speaker 2 And then in the, I think the first edition, the word red is just repeated over and over for three pages before it just stops and a new chapter starts.

Speaker 3 Oh, that's so hot. Yeah.

Speaker 3 All right. I need to go cool down.
Should we take a break?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

Speaker 3 All right. We'll come back and tell you about a lot of this, what these coated flowers mean right after this.

Speaker 2 If you want to know, then you're in luck. Just listen, look to Josh and Chuck.

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Speaker 2 Stuff you should

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Speaker 2 So, Chuck, you mentioned that I gave you a nosegay. Another great word for a nosegay is a tussy mussy.

Speaker 2 And floriography in the Victorian age started to get popular at the same time that tussy mussies and nosegays were popular too.

Speaker 2 And they're really kind of small, short, tightly bound bouquets that you would kind of wear almost as like a boutonnier or a corsage.

Speaker 2 And they were made of flowers and herbs. So not just flowers, but herbs had their own meanings too.

Speaker 2 So like rosemary was for remembrance and mint was for clarity.

Speaker 2 Moss even had its own meaning, charity or maternal love.

Speaker 2 Throw a violet in there, maybe for modesty.

Speaker 2 If you put all this together in a little tussy and gave it to somebody, you would be saying something like, I modestly ask you to clearly remember me with either charity or maternal love, your pick.

Speaker 3 Yeah, which would be a very confusing message.

Speaker 2 It would be

Speaker 3 paging Dr. Freud on that one.
For sure.

Speaker 3 So, obviously, you know, the type of flower is going to matter. The color of the flower is going to matter.

Speaker 3 Many messages could be sent. If you wanted to send a message of rejection or disappointment, it could be a yellow carnation or a yellow rose.

Speaker 3 But if you send a yellow lily, that means that you're just sort of over the moon and walking on air.

Speaker 3 Obviously, the red rose is going to mean I love you. A white rose is purity.
A yellow rose is loss of love. And a crimson rose is for mourning with M-O-U-R.

Speaker 2 Right. And I mean, like, that is just skimming the surface, just the color of different types of roses, right? Or different color roses.
The state that the flower is in mattered a lot, too.

Speaker 2 You made mention, I think, of a withered rose in the Tussie Mussie I gave you.

Speaker 2 If you gave somebody just a plain white rose, you could be saying like, I think you're heavenly, you're very pure, and I like that.

Speaker 2 But if the white rose was withered, you were telling them that they made no impression on you whatsoever, or that you think their beauty is fleeting. So remember that.

Speaker 2 And then if it was dried, you were saying, I would rather die than to give in to your advances because I care about my virtue.

Speaker 2 And I'm sure you could be like, you know, if you gave somebody a withered rose, you'd be like, is this dried or withered? What are you trying to say here?

Speaker 2 So I don't know how much that's how much was like in the beholder's eye. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, translation is important, and you know, we'll get to that here in a sec. But a thornless rose means you've fallen in love at first sight.

Speaker 3 A thornless crimson rose means you're mourning, because remember, crimson rose was mourning, but you're mourning an unrequited love at first sight. Right.

Speaker 3 And also the context really matters. Like, you know, you obviously kind of know what's going on between you.

Speaker 3 It's when you're getting these, or, you know, you're seeking clarity, but there's an established thing kind of happening here for your own context. So if you get a hydrangea,

Speaker 3 it can be thanking the receiver for understanding or that you think they're frigid and heartless. So you really got to kind of have a read on the general air of the relationship.

Speaker 2 Yeah, same with like petunias. You could be saying, you soothe me or I resent you.

Speaker 2 So the context definitely mattered, but the reason why, like, hydrangeas and peonies, and almost all of the flowers had multiple meanings was not because they needed to pull double duty because we didn't have enough flowers and enough colors.

Speaker 2 Like, if you put all those together, you have a mind-boggling number of combinations. So, that wasn't it.

Speaker 2 The reason they had multiple meanings was because there were many, many different floriography books, and essentially a lot of them just assigned different meanings to different flowers. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So when you gave somebody flowers, especially if there wasn't a lot of context yet, you were just hoping that you guys were working from the same book.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I mean, that's huge.

Speaker 2 I think there were 98 different guides just in the United States alone that were circulating from 1827 to 1923.

Speaker 3 Not helpful at all.

Speaker 3 And then, you know, I also mentioned that they were presented upside down. That also matters.
If they are upside down, that's the idea. It basically says it's opposite day.

Speaker 3 So I guess you're trying to sort of maybe confuse if, like, if mom is looking on and sees these flowers, but it would seem like mom would know about opposite day, too.

Speaker 3 So I'm not really sure, you know, why they would do that. Maybe to throw somebody off the scent.
Who knows?

Speaker 3 How the ribbon was tied also matters. Tied to the left, it's the symbolism is applied to the giver.
It's tied to the right if it's in reference to the recipient.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I know. This is how deep it gets.
It could also express a lot of negative meanings. And I think that's what you were doing when you handed a bouquet upside down.

Speaker 2 You'd have to be pretty sharp to put a bunch of mean flowers in and then hand it to the person upside down to let them know you meant the opposite. Yeah.

Speaker 3 But then a lot of trouble to go through.

Speaker 2 Right. There were like you could be talking about jealousy with marigolds.
You could be expressing distrust with lavender. Orange lily straight up said, I hate you.

Speaker 2 You could say, I feel deceived with snapdragons.

Speaker 2 You could declare war with a flower called a tansy, which I hadn't heard of before, but it's like a bunched, a bunch of like small yellow flowers together on like a single stalk.

Speaker 3 Okay. I thought that might have been a misprint pansy, but I literally looked at my computer keyboard and was like, nah, I bet it's, that T and the P are pretty far apart.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I just, I didn't know that that flower existed, but by goodness, it does.

Speaker 3 Also, accepting also mattered. So depending on which hand you accepted the flowers with, sent a message, which I guess would,

Speaker 3 I mean, if you're handing them in person, you would know, but if not, you had to have it relayed back to you.

Speaker 3 If you accepted with the right hand, it was a yes. The left hand was a no.
If you held the bouquet upside down after getting it, that's rejection.

Speaker 3 If someone gave you wisteria, maybe like asking for a dance at a dance, you would hold it upside down with your left hand if you wanted to say no, thank you. Right.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you were really saying I'm passing with that because that's a double no. Although the person giving it could be like, is that a double negative? Like a yes?

Speaker 3 Is it opposite day?

Speaker 2 So you could also, as the receiver, send flowers in return, too.

Speaker 2 Like if somebody actually sent you flowers or a bouquet with a message and didn't physically hand it to you, you could reply with flowers yourselves. Carnations came in handy for that.

Speaker 2 If you sent a solid colored carnation, it meant yes. A yellow carnation was a big fat no.
A striped carnation was letting them down a little easier, but it was still a no.

Speaker 2 It said, I'm sorry, but I can't be with you.

Speaker 3 I wonder which flower meant, like, you know,

Speaker 3 are you down?

Speaker 2 There was something like that out there. I guarantee it.
I don't know which one. Yeah.
But there was definitely something.

Speaker 2 And then the last part, I asked you where you were wearing your nosegay and you said in the center of your bodice, which meant I just want to be friends.

Speaker 2 But if you had worn it over your heart, Chuck, I would have known that you were saying, I love you right back, buddy.

Speaker 3 Hey, I do love you right back, buddy. Just, you know, not like that.

Speaker 2 I understand.

Speaker 2 I took my shot.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I guess then, Chuck Shortstep is out? I think so.

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