Not long ago in this space, we considered postcards suggesting that what the average drinking male wanted from his alcoholic beverage was more. Another load of postcards has come in suggesting there is an aspect of this we did not consider.
Anthropologists, as I have mentioned hereintofore, have split the western world into a Southern tradition of drinking—a modest amount of alcohol to facilitate uninhibited conversation—and a Northern tradition—massive amounts of strong drink to blot out a hostile environment. For those interested in the first tradition, bottles of wine and distilled spirits were readily available over the centuries. For those in the second tradition, the keg or barrel was the natural source of beverage. Sipping was the rule of the day for the Southern tradition; Northern style drinking called for straight guzzling. And those who consumed alcohol in the postcard cartoons often STARTED with guzzling and escalated from there.
The chap at the top of this column, like his counterpart below, are not going to be slowed down by something as time-wasting as pouring their drink from the keg into a mug. The second gentleman is too impatient even to bother with the tap.
This kind of drinking could have its side effects, but that was something to be considered later. (“Later” was not really a concern of the dedicated drinker in either the Northern or Southern tradition. The Southern drinker took longer to get there but was often just as surprised by what waited at that end of the spree.)
By and large, the keg of beer was a symbol of a golden good time, without any hint of aftermath. (One of those fine old jokes we did not cover in the Old Joke Quizzes. “What’s the best cure for a hangover?” “Don’t sober up.”)
But in that age when postcards were the equivalent of today’s tweets, the whiskey barrel was a very common artifact, and presented more opportunities for fun than mere beer, which was actually perceived as more of a family beverage back in the day. (It was, I am informed, entirely plant-based and filled with nutrients which the industry has since filtered away.) The whiskey barrel was for your dedicated drinker, and was obviously a single-serving container.
A feller could really wash away his cares and ignore the world if he had a good supply.
While the powers of a truly potent potable were hardly to be questioned.
All in all, it makes the descendants of these blokes, dependent on corkcrews and discussion of shaken vs. stirred seem like hopeless pikers.
This struck me as an easy one: angels carried inspiration to humans, right? Claire Powell, a floriographer who has no truck with easy answers, says it derives from the custom of poets in Lapland to sniff it before reciting their latest work. Really great Laplander poets were awarded a crown of angelica. That’s about as much as a poet can expect these days, too.
ANGREC “Royalty”
APOCYNUM “Falsehood”
This is one of the traditional meanings which come from Dorothea Dix rather than Mme. De Latour. Dorothea is one of the top five pioneer floriographers whose work informs most subsequent lists. Unlike the others (Mme. De Latour, Henry Phillips, E.W.Wirt, and an anonymous “Lover of Flowers” we’ll discuss later), she ignores the Turks and Greeks and draws her meanings from English flower poets, blokes who went around writing verses in honor of specific flowers, as if they knew that’s what floriographers would be looking for. If one of these gentry mentioned a sentiment in the same sentence as a flower, Dorothea popped it into her glossary. She would quote a bit of the poem as evidence, though not quite enough to show what the poet was thinking about at the time. And she would neglect to give us the title of the poem because we, being bright enough to read flower language books, would also be familiar with the complete works of James Percival or Erasmus Darwin.
Because of this, I am not quite clear on why so many floriographers agree that the apocynum, or dogsbane, means falsehood. My guess is that it’s poisonous (hence the “bane” in “dogsbane”.) Floriographers always took it amiss when something so pretty would not allow itself to be eaten. This is another matter of personal taste, but I think the floriographers expected too much. We can’t all be attractive AND edible.
APPLE “Temptation”
I don’t have to explain this, do I? But see also QUINCE.
APPLE BLOSSOM “Preference”
You give this to someone to say “I Prefer You”, you see. It’s a reference to the Judgement of Paris, which actually involved an apple, but the apple was already taken, more people being familiar with the story of Adam and Eve (see above.)
The Judgement of Paris was the start of the Trojan War which, like a bunch of wars, started miles away from where the fighting took place. The Spirit of Discord, hoping to start something, tossed out a golden apple at a banquet of the gods atop Mt. Olympus. It was inscribed with some foolish line about being intended for the fairest of all the goddesses. Lunging for it at once were the Goddess of Wisdom, the Goddess of Marriage, and the Goddess of Love, who had never gotten along all that well together anyhow. Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite took the apple to Zeus, the Head God, and demanded that he tell them for whom the apple was meant.
Zeus could be crude and clueless, but he did not get to be Head God by being stupid. He was married to one contestant and the probable father of the other two. So he suggested they seek out an impartial judge, preferably a human. Zeus had never liked humans: nasty, dirty things. Greek myth suggested he invented woman just to make their life more miserable. Greek myths are full of jabs at women like this, as you might have guessed from how this story is going so far. Women get to state a few home truths in Finnish Myth, but let’s stick to the Trojan War. The War Between the Sexes is a saga of its own.
The goddesses took their apple down to the most famous playboy of his day: Paris, prince of Troy. Each tried to slip him a bribe, but Aphrodite knew the quickest way to a man’s heart. She promised him a really good-looking woman, and he handed her the apple, showing her his PREFERENCE. That’s where the meaning comes from.
Anyway, Hera and Athena because fiercely anti-Trojan, and stirred up the Greeks after Aphrodite helped Paris get his hands on the Greek Queen Helen, sister of Althaea and already married to…. There’s a fellow named Homer who has covered it all pretty well, if you want to read the rest of the story. If he’s not available, go for Bernard Evslin.
*APRICOT “More Good-Looking Than Good”
APRICOT BLOSSOM “Doubt”
*APRICOT TREE “Disloyalty”
Some floriographer had a bad experience with an apricot at some point.
ARBOR VITAE “Unchanging Friendship”
Arbor Vitae means “Tree of Life”: it’s a good, durable tree. You can see how this meaning and the one which follows came about.
*ARBOR VITAE, AMERICAN “Immortality”
ARBUTUS, TRAILING “Only Thee Do I Love”
*ARETHUSA “I Would rather Not Answer”
Arethusa was a nymph who went in skinny-dipping, as nymphs do, and was pestered by a river god who didn’t amount to much. The gods, hearing her complain, turned her into a fountain. This myth is sadly lacking. She should have been turned into a flower, shouldn’t she, to explain the name of the flower? Okay, the arethusa, a type of orchid, was not known to the Ancient Greeks (or to most floriographers, for that matter) but even so, what kind of a rescue is it if you’re saved from a watery god by being turned into something water flows through? What were the Ancient Greeks thinking?
ARGENTINE “Naivete”
*ARTICHOKE “Your Enterprise There is Dangerous”
Not nearly as dangerous, I expect, as giving your sweetie an artichoke bouquet. The artichoke was once a woman too, according to some floriographers, but none have spelled the story out for me.
ARUM “Ardor”*
This flower gives off heat when it opens, and is generally impressive to look at, too. Not necessarily pretty: just impressive. The arum has thus attracted attention from primitive days, and is believed to be the all-time leader in number of picturesque folk-names. These include Birthroot, Wake Robin, Cuckoo Pint (rhymes with Mint, and refers to an indispensable body organ of the male cuckoo), Lords-and-Ladies, Cows-and-Calves, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, and my favorite, Kitty-Come-Down-the-Lane-Jump-Up-and-Kiss-Me.
ASCLEPIUS “Cure for Heartache”
Asclepius was the Greek God of Medicine. Maybe you can take it from there.
ASH “Grandeur”
If the ancients ascribed a meaning and a personality to every plant they saw, they naturally put a lot of thought into trees, which were so much bigger, towering over the rest. Every tree that grows comes chock full of ancient sentiments and cultural implications which, of course, the floriographers were bound to respect.
Only the floriographers didn’t. The meanings they chose have nothing to do with what the Oak meant to the Druid, or the Ash to the Viking. The floriographers were far more interested in the tales of the Greeks, so much more polished and interesting than the mere savages farther north. And, anyhow, they were interested in flowers; trees were a sideline. So when we come to trees, we find meanings which come from Classical myth, or just some general impression of a tree’s shape and size and commercial uses.
Well, when you think about it, when was the last time you gave your sweetie a bouquet of maple trees?
ASH, MOUNTAIN “Prudence”
*ASPARAGUS “Request”
ASPEN “Lamentation”
The aspen is famous for shaking, so its meanings refer to a person quivering from intense emotion. All kinds of fables explain why the aspen shakes. The most widespread claims that at the time of the Crucifixion, when the sky grew dark, every plant on earth trembled except for the aspen, which up and said, “Hey! The humans made all this trouble for themselves! Why
should WE worry?” It immediately began to shake, as comeuppance for this, and has trembled ever since.
ASPHODEL “My Regrets Follow You to the Grave”*
Asphodel is a gloomy-looking plant which the Greeks set out on graves. According to the Greeks, this was the only plant which grew in Hades, that afterworld of constant gloom. Practically everyone who died went to Hades, where, unless they had committed some notorious crime which won them the personal attention of Hades, the lord of Hades, they just wandered among the asphodel, moaning for all eternity. So, said the Greeks, you had to have a swell time in this life, because it was the only chance you got. Explains a lot about Greek literature.
*ASPIC “Reform Yourself”
This refers to a lavender, not the jelly.
*ASPIDISTRA “Strong Character”
This is also known as Iron Plant, hence the meaning.
ASTER “Afterthought”*
Also known as Starwort (“Aster” comes from the Latin for star; wort is an antique word meaning flower), this frequently blooms late in the season, hence the meaning and also the name “Michaelmas Daisy” given to some varieties, Michaelmas coming at the end of September. A few floriographers claim this as the original “She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not” flower, while others claim the official honor for the marigold. The rest of us are waiting for the next edition of the Petal-Pluckers Handbook.
ASTER, CHINA “Variety”*
A wild variety of flowers was the only wildness a well-bred lady would ever want. “The female who loves the study of botany has no great relish for the wild and feverish dissipations of society.” Monthly Repository and Library of Entertaining Knowledge, Dec., 1832, p. 17
ASTER, DOBULE “I Partake Your Sentiments”.
Nowadays, we simply say, “I agree with you”.
Aster, Sea: see MICHAELMAS DAISY
ASTER, SINGLE “I Will Think of it”
AURICULA “Painting”
A pioneer floriographer, Henry Phillips, gave the game away when he came right out and said he made this up. Why assign “Painting” to the auricula? Because, he wrote, all the really good flowers were already taken.
*AURICULA, GREEN-EDGED “Importune Me Not”
AURICULA, SCARLET “Avarice”
*AURICULA, YELLOW “Splendor”
AUSTURITUM “Splendor”
*AVENS “When You Will”
AZALEA “Temperance”
Because, they say, it grows best in dry soil. A lot of the earlier books call this Acalia, or Acalea. It must be an old-fashioned spelling. All those floriographers couldn’t have been sozzled.
The problem, see, is that the almond blossoms way too early in spring. If there’s a late frost, the blossoms are killed, and there will be no almonds. Optimists, therefore, see the almond as a symbol of constant hope, while the pessimists make it represent indiscretion, stupidity, and even perfidy. Later floriographers used both meanings, giving one to the almond and another to the almond in flower, though they are not at all consistent in which meaning goes with which. Claire Powell blames the pessimistic meaning on the horrid old Victorians, though Mme. De Latour thought of it that way, and Fulvio Pellegrino Morato, of whom more later, was writing about it back in 1545. Richard Folkard, Jr., who compiled an excellent book of plant lore, says the optimistic view is Muslim, and the pessimistic one Hebrew.
ALOE “Bitterness”
Aloes are bitter, that’s all. Popular minority opinions make it “Grief”, which is bitter, or “Religious Superstition”, from a late Egyptian belief that if you brought aloe home from your pilgrimage to Mecca, and pinned it over your door, evil spirits would stay out. It apparently worked so well that eventually Jews and Christians in Egypt were also pinning aloe over their doors. Easier to keep up there than a horseshoe, I suppose.
*ALOE WITH BUTTERCUPS “Perfidy”
Althaea rosea: see HOLLYHOCK, DOUBLE
ALTHEA, or ROSE OF SHARON “Consumed By Love”
When a botanist says althaea, that botanist means a hollyhock. When a gardener says althaea, or althea, what is meant is the Rose of Sharon, which is neither hollyhock nor althaea (or rose, for that matter.) I’m glad we got that cleared up.
The original Althaea was a sister of Leda, the world’s most famous birdwatcher. You should be prepared by that for a story of unnatural history. Althaea had a son, Meleager, of whom the fates foretold that he would grow up to be trustworthy, brave, clean, reverent, etc. BUT, they added, he would live no longer than that log burning on the hearth. Like any mother, Althaea hauled that piece of timber off the fire, stamped out the flames, and locked it away.
Meleager grew up to be one of the Great Greeks. All-around athlete, darling of the public, he was a celebrity with thousands of adoring fans, all of whom found it fitting and proper and romantic that he should fall in love with the greatest female athlete of the day, Atalanta. Meleager’s wife wasn’t all that thrilled about it, but there’s always something.
Meleager and Atalanta galloped side by side in the Calydonian Boar Hunt. The boar was the wildest wild game of all time, and the hunt was the greatest chase in history. Every hunter in the civilized world joined in the adventure. Of course, it was Meleager who finally slew the boar single-handed. He was awarded the boar’s hide, which was the most glorious athletic trophy in the history of mankind.
He gave it to Atalanta.
The public loved it, but his uncles were scandalized. They tried to talk Atalanta into giving it back, which made Meleager so mad, he killed every one of them. This was very wrong of him, but he was a celebrity, remember. Back home, his mother (remember Althaea?) heard that all her brothers had been murdered by her son, and being just as impetuous as Meleager, she ran to her trunk of souvenirs, grabbed out that charmed log, and hurled it into the fire. She was sorry about this later.
Anyway, the log burned up, and so did Meleager. Thus, you see, he was CONSUMED because of his LOVE for Atalanta. Why the flower was not, therefore, called Meleager, I am not in a position to say.
*ALUM ROOT “Undesirable”
ALYSSUM, SWEET “Worth Beyond Beauty”
This is a fragrant medicinal plant some people obviously don’t consider pretty. Charles E, Brown, however, states that it is much admired by fairies. Charles E. Brown does not explain how he came by this information.
AMARANTH “Immortality”*
Long-lasting flowers made the amaranth a symbol of long life. If you want a ten-dollar word for “durable”, you can say “amaranthine”. The following meaning is obviously related.
AMARANTH, GLOBE “Unchangeable”
AMARYLLIS “Pride”*
The amaryllis stands straight and tall, flaunting its flower. Some floriographers go so far as to call it haughty, because it sometimes refuses to flower at all. More charitable floriographers, following the lead of Dorothea Dix, feel it’s simply timid.
AMBROSIA “Love Returned”
Ambrosia was the food of the gods, and very sweet. Love returned is sweet, too, you see. Hilderic Friend claims that ambrosia is the name of any flower which can turn a human into a fairy. Not all floriographers take an interest in fairies; it’s a matter of personal taste.
AMETHYST “Admiration”
This is a type of Browallia, not the gemstone.
Ampelopsis: see IVY, JAPANESE
ANDROMEDA “Self-sacrifice”
Andromeda is the ancestor of every storybook damsel in distress. The books I have consulted do not suggest that she volunteered to be chained naked to a cliff in expiation of her mother’s misdeeds, but maybe they just left out that part. It would have made the meaning “self-sacrifice” reasonable, but they may have had other sea monsters to fry.
As long as you asked, she was an Ethiopian princess. Her mother, Cassiopeia, claimed to be better=-looking than the sea nymphs. You might think sea nymphs would be too busy frolicking in the surf to take notice, but they were offended. Taking their complaint to the sea god Poseidon, or his local affiliate, they got a massive sea monster sent to ravage the countryside.
Cephus, the King of Ethiopia, consulted an oracle, which told him to sacrifice his only child. He had just had her stripped and chained to the rocks when who should he see but the hero of our story flying past?
This was Perseus, riding the winged horse Pegasus. He had places to go and things to do, but got a good look at Andromeda on the rocks and made a quick U-turn to talk things over with Cephus. The king promised Andromeda to Perseus without batting an eyelash. He was very good at this. Not only had he already promised Andromeda to the monster, but before the story started, had promised her to another prince. This prince turned up later to kill Perseus, though he had shown no interest in killing the monster. Perseus, having just slain the sea creepy, was worn out and would have been easy prey had he not also been carrying the head of Medusa, whom he
had also recently slain. He pulled out this head, which turned all his enemies to stone, and flew off on Pegasus with Andromeda. They had a son named Perses, who grew up to be the father of all Persians.
Andromeda does not get so much as a cry of “Help help!” in the whole story, as far as I can see, but she did get a flower named for her and, after she died, she was put in the sky as a constellation. In those days, practically anybody could become a constellation. Cephus and the sea monster and even Cassiopeia all became constellations. Poseidon was still sore about what she’d said about the sea nymphs, though, and decreed that for much of the year, Cassiopeia would be visible in the night sky on her back, with her legs up in the air. Mention this to your scoutmaster on the next campout and see what happens.
ANEMONE “Expectation”
ANEMONE, FIELD “Sickness”*
ANEMONE, GARDEN “Forsaken”
This is the first of several flowers we will discuss where the floriographers picked out one meaning for the basic flower, and then something else for the different varieties. They are not consistent on which anemone means what, but this seems to be the most popular distribution of meanings. George H. O’Neill in 1917 suggested using the first meaning if you had a bouquet of several kinds, and one of the others if you had a nosegay of all the same kind.
The “expectation” meaning comes from the anemone’s flowering so early in spring. “Forsaken” may be an extension of this, since the anemone is fragile and easily killed. This may also be responsible for the “sickness” meaning, but there was for many years a tradition that the wild (or field) anemone was poisonous. Claire Powell says it merely smells sickening, but the
ancient Persians believed that just inhaling a breeze which had passed over a field of anemones would kill you. I doubt this. I have not checked it out myself, no, but I would have, had there been a breeze and a field of anemones handy, and if I hadn’t been rather busy this morning.
We have dealt, in this space, with certain animals and their roles in postcard cartoons. We have considered dogs and their job chasing suspicious characters, as well as for their enthusiastic urination habits, each heavily covered by our cartoonists. Cats, we have seen, spend a lot of time yowling on back fences. One day, we will consider camels (long before Hump Day, they were best known for not drinking), mice (their apparent goal in life was to scare women with long skirts), and elephants (always, always forgetting things, at least on postcards.) We have also considered the donkey, one of whose leading purposes on postcards was to make it possible for the cartoonist to make ass jokes.
We are venturing into donkey territory again, but with another denizen of the barnyard. The neighborhood bull was, in postcard humor of the early century, used mainly as a stand-in for the bulldog. It chased people, frequently people who had done nothing to deserve it. But as the century moved on, the bull, without abandoning that pursuit, was now used to symbolize a word only half of which was “bull”.
I have not checked the Interwebs to find out when “bull” became a substitute for the full word. But it was certainly well known enough by midcentury to provide the gag for such genial postcards as the one at the top of this column as well as the one that follows, which provide cows as explanations of the joke.
It became a common enough gag in short order, so that cartoonists had to start tossing in a second joke to satisfy their own self-respect.
In this one, the second joke comes first, and is derived from the way cows go…oh, you got that one all by yourself.
Other cartoonists avoided the “No Bull” joke, and actually put the bull on the postcard, which, of course, is the reason for this blog in the first place. (We could have done a whole blog on the principle that a cow is not a bull, but this seems a little thin, even for me. There are those who will insist that a bull is not a cow, either, but this seems not to be true. Cattle producers I have encountered seem to use the word “cattle” mainly in a business sense, and when dealing with the actual animals, tend to say “cows”, even when speaking of the male version. One could pursue this phenomenon through our lingo, and bring in the term “cowboys”—there don’t seem to be “bullboys” though there are “bully boys” in certain parts of the world. And then the word “cowgirls” becomes…where were we?)
Sometimes the use of the word was a simple family matter, with Mom, Dad, and Junior acting out the gag,, and no humans involved.
It was rather nice of some of these postcard artists to warn the recipient of the card what to expect.
Here we have a cowboy using the word as a general philosophy of life. (This is the oldest card I have to use the joke, and dates to 1913, if you’re studying the use of “bull” as shorthand.)
This, on the other hand, is the card which eases up closest to the actual phraseology, and comes from roughly forty years later. (Listen to the bunny.)
And here I believe we should halt, as we have spent enough time on this particular joke.
Mere months ago, we considered the postcard possibilities of canoodling in a Cadillac or fooling around in a Ford. We looked at a number of postcards chuckled at by our ancestors which dealt with the uses of an automobile for a little romance on the road, and the perils associated with it. That heroic generation, used to automobiles without roofs, or with soft fabric roofs which might or might not be put up, depending on the weather, were amused by people getting tossed out on the road, especially if they were doing something that occupied much of their attention at the time.
With one or two exceptions, we did not consider the people who got beyond a quick hug or kiss before hitting a rock and being pitched to the pavement. The postcard artists were not particularly shy about the possibilities; I just seem, accidentally or on purpose (go ahead: guess), to have set certain cards aside for some future blog. Certainly the things which could happen on a long drive out in the country abound in the literature of an early day, from fine old jokes (“Can you drive with just one hand?” “Sure thing, Babe!” “Good, have an apple.”) to what many feel is the oldest existing American pornographic movie, A Free Ride.
Sometimes the automobile is just used as an excuse for implied naughtiness, as in this postcard, which we have discussed before. (General Motors had just introduced automobiles with “knee action”, and the cartoonists could not resist.)
The lady here is blushing because she is applying the words, mentally, the way the artist intended us to do.
That’s the key to postcard humor, of course. (Any other oldtimers around there remember when cars had keys?) if you wanted that postcard to sell out in the open, where everyone could see it, you could not come right out and SHOW what was going on in the automobile. One had to assume one’s readers would have naughty enough minds to understand why, for example, this man is planning to run out of gas.
Or what the cop is seeing through the window. (Nice picture, nice joke, and I hate to be vulgar, but…isn’t that car a little small for what we’re supposed to be imagining? Or are you imagining something else? If you’re muttering, “Size doesn’t matter”, you are definitely staying after class. Be prepared to show your work.)
Naughty minds are not purely mid-century, by the way. This image dates to about 1906, and the postcard buyer of that distant day knew very well what the cartoonist—and the couple shown in high-society motoring outfits—was driving at.
To get our minds, if not the cartoon characters involved, out of the gutter, we shall close by considering that some cartoonists thought the automobile provided great opportunities for meeting possible romantic partners.
Though even in this case, they suggested driving carefully.
Despite its appearance in eight of the flower language books consulted, abatina is still a mystery to me. The best io can tell you is that once upon a time, the conifers, or trees with cones, were referred to as “abietinae”. But see the next entry.
ABECEDARY “Volubility”
Almost everyone who listed abatina followed it up with the abecedary. As a flower, abecedary is another mystery. However, it is a word referring to any book in alphabetical order, like a flower language dictionary, so it could be a ringer. Reference books often include joke entries, so people who make them can find out what other reference books just swiped the data word for word without doing any original research. This entry appears in seven books, so six of those nice floriographers…but perhaps I’m overlooking something obvious.
Abele: see POPLAR, WHITE
ACACIA “Platonic Love”*
The floriographers go into a number of variations on this theme, but all boil down to a quiet kind of love, a chaste love. Sarah Josepha Hale, the flower language pioneer now best remembered for writing “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, says the meaning comes from the way the acacia blooms unnoticed in the wilderness. Mme. De Latour was plainer: the acacia did its blooming far away in savage lands (specifically Canada.) Henry Phillips, among others, explains North American Indians themselves considered acacia a symbol of chaste love. And Laura Peroni, a twentieth century Italian floriographer, says that chaste love is so hopelessly outdated that we should drop this meaning and make acacia an emblem of the Women’s Movement. There are people like Laura Peroni all over the world; it isn’t Italy’s fault.
Acacia, Pick: see ACACIA, ROSE
ACACIA, ROSE: “Elegance”*
Claire Powell attributes this to the flower’s resemblance to a woman in a ball gown. Um, okay, fine. A lot of floriographers, swiping from Me. De Latour, list this under the roses, as the Acacia Rose. Forgetting their high school French, which taught us that the adjective follows the noun, they assumed it was French rose, whereas it actually means “Pink Acacia” (which appears in dictionaries by floriographers with better French).
You didn’t ask, but Acacia was also the name of the most elegant fraternity on campus in my college days, a house of four-point scholars who got together for cribbage and beer. They went after any freshman who might raise the grade point average. Yeah, they asked me to pledge. Spelled my name wrong in the letter.
Acacia, White: see ROSE ACACIA
Acacia, Yellow: see ACACIA
ACANTHUS “The Arts”*
Do kids in school still have to memorize the styles of capitals on Greek columns? There were three, as you recall, and our teachers thought this information was vital to our understanding of the universe. Doric was plain, Ionian was mildly interesting, and Corinthian was a real bear to draw on the test papers: all swirls and curlicues. Well, the swirls and curlicues represented the acanthus. Callimachus, an ancient Greek who still carries some clout, spotted acanthus plants twining around a woman’s tombstone, and thought they were amazing. According to Will Cuppy, who is generally to be relied upon except in the matter of fried bananas, Callimachus was a critic whose word was law. If he said acanthus was artistic, you were simply null and void if you didn’t include some in your work. Greek artists started twining so much acanthus in their sculpture that it was remembered centuries later by Mme. De Latour.
Achillea millefolia: See YARROW
ACHILLEA PTARNICA: “Tears”
This old-fashioned plant was also known simply as “The Pearl”. A resemblance of tears to pearls is implied.
ACHIMENES CUPREATA “Such Worth is rare”
Aconite: See MONK’S HOOD
Aconite, Winter: see FAIR MAIDS OF FRANCE
*ACORN: “Goodness”
ADAM’S NEEDLE “Mend Your Ways”
Also called Spanish Bayonet, or Yucca filamentosa, this was believed to have been used to sew fig leaves into the first lingerie. (Note that Adam was doing the sewing.)
ADDER’S TONGUE “Jealousy”
ADONIS “Sorrowful remembrances”
Adonis was simply the best-looking Greek of his day. The Goddess of Love, Aphrodite, fell for him hard, though he was the rugged outdoorsy type and she ran more along the lines of “Beulah, peel me a grape”. Isn’t that always the way? Adonis was gutted by a wild boar on one of his hunting trips. This flower allegedly sprang from his blood. (Aphrodite’s tears became the anemone.)
Adonis has been a symbol of male beauty ever since, and, to some, of beauty that dies young. One of the practices of the cult of Adonis was a perverse sort of gardening in which flowers were planted in shallow soil so they would spring up, blossom, and then wither, allowing everyone to grieve for the memory of glories that had died. Well, it passed the time on a Sunday afternoon.
Floriographers also call this Flos Adonis, Adonis Flos, Adonis Vernalis, and Pheasant’s Eye. Others insist that Adonis Flos and Adonis Vernalis are different plants (but give them similar meanings.)
AGERATUM “Indispensable for Progress”
AGNUS CASTUS “Coldness; To Live Without Love”
People go on about aphrodisiacs, potions alleged to improve the sex drive, but you don’t get nearly as much literature these days about anaphrodisiacs, or sex suppressants. This plant was popular for such uses during the Middle Ages. Its seeds were considered contraceptive, while monks and nuns supposedly made britches and girdles of the stuff to insure chastity. It would insure something.
AGRIMONY “Gratitude”*
The floriographers are not as clear on how they thought this up as I’d like. A modern floriographer, Claire Powell, says the plant is actually called “Gratitude” by gardeners, and does nothing about it. She goes on to say that its blossoms are shaped like little bells. This makes people think of church bells. That in turn reminds people of medieval monasteries, which granted hospitality to weary travelers, who were then Grateful. Well, of course. Obvious, when you think about it.
*AILANTHUS “Have Faith”
*ALDER “Baffled, Bewildered”
*ALDER, BLACK “I Wait Help”
*ALDER, DWARF “Convenience”
Alfalfa: See LUCERNE
ALLSPICE “Compassion”
A twentieth century floriographer, Lesley Gordon, says this is because whenever you cut off one bud, two grow back.
Now that we have sent two blogs on the introduction and foreword and such, that flower language can settle into the Monday slot previously occupied by the glories of my Old Joke Quizbook. Those of you who have been yearning for postcard pictures can resume their regularly-scheduled program today, while those waiting for more flower language will need to yearn until Monday. Those of you yearning for more old joke quizzes can go back and read the old ones, or check online for a good therapist.
Nonetheless, we are not straying too far from floriography today. As I mentioned in the introduction and will examine more thoroughly in the installments to come, flower language is not especially limited to flowers. The floriographers were interested in anything botanical, so they developed meanings for fruits, vegetables, trees, mosses, individual flower petals and, in the case of some extreme floral cryptographers, even the cloth or string the bouquet was tied up in. (And if you handed someone a flower sideways instead of rightside up, it changed the meaning to…let’s wait for Monday, eh?)
But postcard publishers, besides printing their own series of flower language postcards, were willing to show just pretty flower pictures, as you will see in weeks to come as I illustrate the floriography installments. AND they were interested in other parts of the botanical world. For one thing, there was a massive vogue, not quite dead even today, for pictures of big vegetables. These are known as “exaggerated” postcards, and unlike the one at the top of this column, often involved trick photography. Corn was one of the most popular subjects, but apples, pumpkins, tomatoes, and just about anything else was fair game.
Our ancestors, who lived in a world where refined sugar was a lot harder to get, found fruit extremely appealing, as food and as symbol. Of course, sour fruits were considered kind of a disappointment, as we have discussed in previous columns where we discussed the custom of “handing someone a lemon”. Lemons were considered a symbol of undesirability long before the term was applied mainly to used cars.
I have not done the research on when really, really good things, especially young women, were described as “peaches” for the first time, but it does feature in a number of pop songs from the turn of the last century, and it is not neglected by postcard artists.
The number of postcards dealing solely with the puns on pear and peach in the same card would probably make a nice collection alone.
And then there was this banana craze at roughly the same point in our history, culminating in the inescapable success of the song “Yes, We have No Bananas” in 1923. Fotr those of you old enough to recall this ditty, I am happy to have introduced your earworm for the morning.
Ytrr puns were not neglected, since tree names have a tendency to have kust one syllable, making them vulnerable. This artist used up two puns in one card, and could have done more, but may not have wanted to go that fir. (Thank you, thank you: just throw money.)
I think this artist has clouded the issue. Very nice picture, of course, but is the message “Pine for you” or “Pine cone for you”? Or am I missing some subtle cultural association, as usual?
Returning to vegetables, we find that even normal-sized ones had their applications in the postcard world, and were just as liable to atrocious punning
There was really intense debate, on a professional level, as to whether a pun constituted humor at all, or was just a sort of really cheap word puzzle. This did not slow down the minds of writers, though, who were not at all abashed to be involved in such games.
Sorry if you don’t carrot all for such things. We’ll turn back to flower subjects come Monday.
An average entry in this book consists of two to four parts and looks something like this:
BANANA BLOSSOM* “Old Jokes
A” B C
D
Slipping on a banana peel is one of the oldest jokes in the book. It may or may not be one of the oldest jokes in THIS book. I have kept no statistics on that.
A.THE NAME OF THE PLANT
You’d think this would be the easy part, wouldn’t you? A rose is a rose is not a rutabaga, right? Ho. And if I may inject a personal note, ha ha.
What the world could really use is a thesaurus of plant and flower names. You will not find that here, as I have tried to stick to the names used in the books I saw. Some botanical experts sit around together and debate what some dreamy poet meant six hundred years ago by “marygowld”. Floriographers have not done much better than the poets. A cowslip is this book from 1845 may not be the same plant at all as the cowslip mentioned in this title from 1867.
Some people can be sidetracked by old names and spellings, but these are not the worst problem in the plant world. Anyone who can’t guess what the writers meant by “Lilach”, “Nasturtion”, or “Persimon” should probably go in for another line of work. Folk names are usually not a problem, either: there are already plant nickname dictionaries to tell us what a floriographers meant by the “Kissmequick” or “Cowsandcalves”.
No, it’s the most basic, common everyday name of the plant which is the problem, the things you assume you already know. Floriography traveled from Turley to France to the rest of the world. Thinking about this gives you the hint: plants that grow naturally in Turkey are not the same plants to be found in Provence, Sussex, or Massachusetts.
But sometimes the NAMES are the same. A homesick immigrant in New Jersey, seeing a little blue flower, will call it by the name of his favorite little blue flower back home, unaware that another homesick immigrant, once his neighbor, is applying that name to an entirely different flower in Georgia. Botanists have wrestled with the ensuing confusion for centuries, with little or no help from gardeners and seed catalogs. (In 1730, a Society of Gardeners was formed to standardize plant names; it seems not to have worked.)
Some scientifically-minded floriographers would note the scientific, or Latin, name of the plant being written about. But botanists have been changing the scientific names for years, apparently in the belief that this accomplishes something. They could be right, regarding current accuracy, but it only confuses those of us with thumbs of another color. I do not type this with my fingers crossed: my own botanical knowledge is limited to being able to tell a dandelion from a sunflower at ten paces. I’m in good company. A lot of the floriographers were in the same condition.
Take the “Champion Rose”, which appears in several flower language dictionaries. Maybe there is such thing. But its meaning is the same as that given in other books as “Rose Campion”. Somebody writing a book, never having heard of Rose Campion, could easily say “This is a typo for ‘Rose, Champion’!” So they corrected the “error”. I keep running into the “Cuckoo Pink”, too. This is not a kind of pink, but an arum, known as the Cuckoo Pint. Someone saw this, again assumed there was an error, and “fixed” it, So the researcher in fields of floriography must deal not only with archaic folk names but misprinted folk names, too.
The best I can promise is that I’ve looked into the business at some length, and if a majority of experts told me Common Milfoil and Achillea millefolia were the same thing, and its name was Yarrow, I have written up such entries under Yarrow.
Unless, of course, some floriographer decided to give each different name a different meaning, in which case these will appear under the names that got the credit. I have tried to steer clear of noted historical controversies, and there will be no arguing in this book over whether the Forbidden Fruit in the Garden of Eden was a peach, a plum, or a pomegranate, and you will look
in vain for the troublemakers who insist St. Patrick never saw a shamrock, and converted Ireland with wood sorrel.
You are free to study these things on your own and draw your own conclusions, writing corrections in the margins of this book (assuming you paid for it.) But please don’t write to tell me about it. I’ve gotten weary of the arguments.
B. THE ASTERISK
If only one book I found mentioned a plant, I have put an asterisk at the front of the entry (A). This means that plant is not really a part of the flower language tradition, just something a floriographer threw in because existence would be meaningless without it. It may also indicate a folk name only that particular floriographer used.
An asterisk after the meaning (C) means just the opposite. That flower was in Mme. De Latour’s text and was thus part of flower language from the very beginning.
C. THE MEANING
This, in quotations, is what I felt was the consensus of the experts, whether it was a majority of two or of twenty. In the case of ties, Mme. De Latour’s meaning, or the one nearest to it in age, was chosen. If you are planning to use this book as a code for your messages, you need read no further.
D. INTERPRETATION
Here’s where I guess why the floriographers assigned this meaning to that plant. If I don’t have a clue, the section is lacking. Sometimes the connection is easy to pick out. More
than one commentator points out that white flowers generally indicate purity and innocence, blue ones fidelity, and yellow ones something nasty. Dark trees or flowers which hung their heads
suggest mourning. Food plants indicate wealth; poisonous plants evil. Early spring blossoms often mean hope, while flowers of later fall indicate consolation.
Beyond these elementary guidelines, floriographers looked to literature, particularly Classical mythology and the Bible, in that order. Poetry was an essential part of flower language books, and though the floriographers generally picked the meaning first and then the verse to go with it, sometimes a poem would suggest the meaning. If you have ever known a poet, you know how chancy this can be: those livestock are likely to come out with most anything.
What is endearing about the floriographers is that once they started assigning meanings to plants, they did not stick to the obvious easy choices but pulled in every wild flower they’d ever seen. This included some which today draw the response, “Why bother with a weed like that?” But to them, “A weed is just a flower in disguise.” The militant floriographers saw blossoms as something more than what you hiked past on a nature walk or ripped up to use as decoration. Flowers had been put on earth for a reason, so there had to be some sentiment attached to them to record in a flower language book. (And it made the book bigger.)
Meanings were not, as I hope you read earlier in this book, decreed by ancient tradition or put together by one writer in any systematic plan. Floriographers of varying intelligence and ability reshaped Mme. De Latour’s original any time they saw fit, adding meanings they
“plucked from the wayside, broke from the heather, tore from the thickets, ripped from the lane”. The result is a tumbled and miscellaneous collection of folklore and myth. Most floriographers
admit this. A few claim to be conveying ancient wisdom, though how they came by that wisdom they never say. Such authors frequently spurn previous floriographers and seek out flower
learning among people too primitive to be as nasty and materialistic as we. These primitives often live in the Orient: we never outgrew our habit of looking to the East for enlightenment, or at least relief from boredom. People who are immersed in nature, as nature intended, ascribe to every tree and plant a personality and ancient significance beyond the grasp of westerners. (These writers are generally part of the materialistic, grasping civilization, yet THEY have no trouble perceiving the primitive wisdom, for reasons they never come right out with. Do you feel a little insulted? Or is it just me?)
Thus a native of Thribaty or Slapyak, on seeing a lotus, will not say “Oh, how pretty!” but instead experience a transcendent and enlightened understanding of all the flower’s cultural and historical associations. These writers feel that’s all to the good, and provide their flower dictionaries to help young people experience a fuller consciousness of the natural world.
It is possible to go in for a deep understanding of the historical and metaphysical implications of everything you see. I’m not knocking it; I just have other things to do. There’s the roast to be taken to the groomer, and the poodle to be put in the oven. And I do think it’s a bit much to expect from one catch phrase in a dictionary.
Anyway, what’s wrong with “Oh, how pretty!”? It beats “That must have cost a bundle!”, which is what I generally hear when someone shows off a bouquet. I do mention anything of historical or metaphysical import that I find, but I can work only with what the floriographers give me.
This is information for which there is NO PRACTICAL USE. None/ None whatsoever. Stop looking for it.
From the outset, flower language experts—floriographers—had no illusions. Elizabeth W. Wirt, author of the second flower language book published in the United States, wrote, “The lady who has given her leisure hours to this little play of fancy, has not the vanity to attach any serious importance to it” and goes on, with a kind of literary shrug, to say that, at least, “One may be worse employed than in conversing with flowers.” One of her successors wrote, more flatly, “:We spend our time in the invention and production of vanities, and our money and talents to procure them.”
Like all trifles that last for generations, flower language begins with a simple premise. When you hand someone a flower, you may seem to be indulging in a simple display of regard, But in the language of the flowers, each specific plant has an attendant meaning: depending on the bloom you choose, you may be testifying to your sweetheart’s intelligence, beauty, and fidelity. Or, just as easily, you can tell her she’s getting a little thick in the hips, or inform him that the sleek young tramp he was out with last night didn’t LOOK like his cousin from Dubuque.
Communication through flowers goes back eons, perhaps to a time before communication with spoken language. (I wasn’t there; I can’t say.) Shakespeare immortalized his era’s version of flower language in “Hamlet”. That’s all beside the point. This book outlines a specific flower language system first set down in the early nineteenth century, which became standard in the English-speaking world and continues to pop up in gift books and tomes on flower arrangement to this day. This flower language has some connections with its ancestors, but it is not a descendant born in wedlock.
Where this particular flower code—floriography—came from is a matter of debate. A few floriographers take it back to Ancient Rome, and the Feast of Flora, Goddess of Flowers, with feasting and games lasting from about April 28 to May 2. William S. Walsh, in 1897, called this festival, the Floralia, “highly distasteful”. Most Roman festivals carry an unsavory air, but the Floralia seems to have been the McCoy, a fertility festival involving naked dancers in a series of events designed to remind everybody that flowers are, after all, the plant’s reproductive organs.
According to this theory, Roman floriography went into a decline, along with other modestly important things, when Rome fell. It was revived in the Middle Ages by, of all institutions, the Roman Catholic Church, which decided to advance civilization by inventing an Age of Chivalry. This is not the way my professors explained the Age of Chivalry, but let it pass.
That theory won’t carry much water. Scholars have written extensively about the Roman Empire, even its attitude about flowers, and have explored the symbolism of Christian painting in the Middle Ages in depth (and at length.) Almost nothing was carried over from those systems to modern floriography. Most floriographers look farther East.
Our ancestors saw the orient—by which they meant everything from Egypt to Japan—as a land of peaceful, lazy, highly cultured, illiterate, high-minded, unprincipled, deeply spiritual pagans who perceived the beauty and symbolism of nature more readily than the materialistic Christian societies of Europe. This “wisdom of the East” concept persists to this day, and goes back at least to the Crusaders, who took their holy war east and brought back new philosophies and new viewpoints (as well as a new set of numbers, making possible long division, Algebra, and the IRS.)
Going to the orient continued to be an adventure even after the Crusades were over, and tourists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought back many tales of wonder, including stories of a secret language of the flowers. A very nice tale of how floriography came to Europe can be found in the Southern Literary Messenger of May, 1841: all about a young French tourist who learns the language, exchanges bouquets with the neglected umpteenth wife of a sultan, and eloped with her one step ahead of the royal executioner.
Oddly, there might be a grain of truth in this wild romance. The first Western record of floriography appears in A New Voyage to the levant by Jean Dumont, published in Paris in 1694 and in England in 1696 (from a publisher named, if you please, Matthew Gillyflower.) Dumont tells what is basically the same story…in a darker version. His French tourist swaps bouquets for a while, and the messages eventually cause him to be smuggled into the harem. After a day or two of entertaining the neglected umpteenth wife, he is so worn down that he tries to leave. His paramour informs him that he is now her property for as long as he lasts. He is able to beg assistance from an elderly (and virginal) harem maid, who offers a way out in return for a service he is in no state to perform. But he struggles manfully (if I may so express it) and is smuggled out of the harem through a chimney. (I am resisting the symbolism here.) M. Dumont says the experience cured him of any interest in Turkish ladies.
Dumont does not say a lot about the language itself, however, noting only that harem ladies received “instead of a BILLET-DOUX…nothing but bits of CHARCOAL, SCARLET CLOTH, SAFFRON, ASHES, and such like trash, wrapt up in a Piece of paper.” Dumont does not seem to have been much of a romantic, despite his interest in…you don’t suppose HE was the French tourist in the story, do you? Might explain a lot.
The story was romantic enough, in any case, to appeal to society women with as much time on their hands as the ladies of the harem. In the next century, when Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was at the British Embassy in Turkey, a friend back home wrote and asked her to send a Turkish love Letter and a handsome Greek slave. (Our ancestors were also obsessed by the idea of the cultured Greeks being slaves of the illiterate, unprincipled, etc. etc.) Lady Mary wrote back, “I see you have taken your ideas of turkey from that worthy author Dumont, who has
writ with equal ignorance and confidence.” She declined to ship over a handsome slave, but she did enclose a Turkish love letter, which she admitted Dumont had described correctly. “There is no flower, no seed, no fruit, herb, pebble, or feather that has not a verse belonging to it,” she wrote.
The letter and her translation of the verses to explain it is dated March 16, 1718; they were probably circulated among the recipient’s friends. After Lady Mary’s death, her letters were published, including this one, setting off a fad for Turkish flower language in 1763. The example she sent included not only flowers and plants, but other artifacts as well. Sticking to our interest in the botanical part of the language, with her translation of the sentiment and, just to be troublesome, a more modern translation of the original Turkish, given in the 1965 edition of The Complete Letters of Mary Wortley Montagu, Oxford, 1965, edited by Robert Halsband.
GRAPE: My Eyes (My Two Eyes)
JONQUIL Have Pity on My Passion (Find the remedy for My passion)
PEAR: Give Me Some Hope (Give Me Some Hope)
PEPPER: Send me An Answer (Send Me a True Answer)
ROSE: May You be pleased and All Your Sorrows Mine (I Weep; You Laugh)
STRAW: Suffer Me To Be Your Slave (The modern translator agrees, but says it should have been a straw sandal, not a straw)
CLOVE: You Are As Slender As This Clove; You Are an Unblown Rose (The translator says this should have been CARNATION: You Are the Carnation inconstant; You Are the Budding Rose Inattentive. I Have Long loved You. You Have had No Word of It From Me.)
Meanwhile, another travel writer, Aubrey de la Mottraye, had been doing his best for Turkish love Letters. Like Dumont, he knew Western readers were hungry for details about the legendary sex lives of the Turks. In 1730, in his Travels through Europe, Asia, and a Part of Africa, he wrote about Turkish men who slashed themselves with knives to express their love. “Those who are of a high rank, and more Polite, make use of certain signs, as Fruit, Flowers, and Gold and Silver thread, or silk of divers Colours, which have each of them their particular meaning explained by certain TURKISH verses, which the young ladies learn by tradition of one another…they learn this before their ABCs.”
Even better, he included, in an appendix, two examples of such letters. Like the letters cited by Dumont and Lady Mary, these included not just flowers but broken coffee cups, ashes, and anything else that might be found lying about in a harem. Here are the plants and flowers extracted from his letters.
APPLE: Depart Not From Me, Thou Spring of My Life
BARLEY: My Love Met With Insurmountable Obstacles
CELERY: What Shall I Not Be Forced to Flee?
CHESTNUT: May There Be a Mutual Transmigration of Souls
CUCUMBER: If It Be So, My Rivals Will Distract Me
CUMIN SEED: If I Did Not Send to Her Who Is the Life of My Heart
HARLIC: Let My Arms Soon Supply the Place of Your Girdle
LENTIL: Mahomet (sender of one of the letters)
NARCISSUS: I Am Entirely Yours
OATS: I Will Not Be Perjured
OLIVE: I Had Rather See Thee Carried Dead Before My Door Than (Have You) Live Inconstant and Perjured
SPINACH: Assist Me to Disperse All the Obstacles and Clouds Which hide Me From the Sparkling Stars of My Beloved
STRAW: Where is the Word of a Muslim?
TEA: Thou Sun of My Brightest Days and Moon of My Serenest Nights
TOBACCO: My Heart is Innocent of What You reproach Me With
VINE LEAF: Fatima (Sender of the other letter)
Rather talky, and a little cumbersome for an efficient code, but very romantic, and appearing in a Europe already wrapped up in fashions for botany, nature, and folklore. The work of Linnaeus, particularly in his identification of the sexual nature of plants, had given people a whole new reason to study flowers. The Age of Reason had also precipitated another of those Back to Nature movements. And a rising interest in folklore, which would come to a peak in the work of the Brothers Grimm, encouraged an interest in lore passed down through the centuries. (By the way, that era of nature study and folklore was followed by one which became famous for prudery and repression, Keep your eyes open.)
A few anti-floriography voices could be heard. The leading expert on Middle Eastern Studies in his day, Ritter Joseph von hammer (later Freiherr Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall) stated that the whole thing was balderdash. (He used more scientific terms. And in German, too.) After reading a hundred of the traditional Turkish flower language verses, he stated that somehow that deep inner meaning always rhymed with the name of the flower. Turkish flower
language, he said, was no great oral tradition dating back to the beginning of human perception, but a game made up to entertain during long, boring hours of harem life, and handed down from one generation of floozies to the next. This was neither the first nor the last time that Romance and Science got a good look at each other and ran screaming in opposite directions.
Interest in flower language continued in spite of such scientific souls, but it remained an oral tradition. One aristocratic lady would pass it along to a younger one, and it continued as it had in the harems. What was needed was an authority who could codify all this data into a dictionary. Only after that was done, and the result printed up in an attractive and relatively inexpensive format, could it really spread among all classes.
The mother (or perhaps father) of floriography as we know it called herself Charlotte de Latour. Her book, Le Langage des Fleurs, was published around 1817. (The earliest edition with a date printed inside is a German edition of 1820.) Charlotte de Latour, according to a number of authorities, including the Library of Congress, was Louise Cortambert, wife of geographer Eugene Cortambert, mother of novelist Richard Cortambert, and sister-in-law of Louis Cortambert, an important figure in French-American publishing, settling in St. Louis, Missouri (Which may explain why the earliest English translations of Charlotte de Latour’s book were published in this country, though British floriographers certainly read it.)
Mme. Cortambert never admitted in print that she was Charlotte de Latour, though she DID use the name, fifty years later, when writing novels. This does not convince some experts, including cataloguers at the British museum, who hold that the real Charlotte was Louis-Aime Martin, author of Lettres a Sophie, a book quoted in Le Langage des Fleurs. Belgian editions of Le Langage des Fleurs do name Louis-Aime Martin as the author, but the text of these editions is
oddly altered: Louis-Aime Martin would not be the last floriographers to steal his data, rearrange it a bit to make it look new, and publish it as his own. (If that’s what he did, and it wasn’t all some mistake at the publisher’s office.) An 1825 auction of Louis-Aime-Martin’s book collection does include a special limited edition of Le Langage des Fleurs, of which only twenty copies were printed. But I’m not sure what that proves.
Regardless of who wrote Charlotte de Latour’s book (and one must not ignore the possibility that it was someone named Charlotte de Latour), this French-Flower bilingual dictionary swept Europe and charged overseas. The first American floriography may have been The Garland of Flora, printed in 1829 in Boston, of all places, and written by Dorothea Dix, of all persons. This was followed by Flora’s Dictionary by “A Lady” (Elizabeth W. Wirt) and “Flora’s interpreter” by Sarah Josepha hale. An anonymous translation of Charlotte de Latour’s original appeared in 1634, and the floodgates were opened. Newspapers and magazines found it easy to fill space with the new language; the annual gift books fashionable in the period practically required a section of flower language. Floriography became, for a while, an essential adjunct to fashion.
Flower language guides of the 1840s followed a basic pattern. One flower was featured per page. Beneath the name of the flower came a Significance (its floriographic definition), a Sentiment (a sweet little poem suitable for recital), and a paragraph of scientific information (so you knew exactly which plant you were talking about.) These books were considered by their owners as educational toys: elegant, civilized, useful. “The cultivation of the language of flowers in America,” said the New York Mirror of October 27, 1832, “is a highly favorable
indication of increasing refinement among us.” The reader could commune with nature, contemplate edifying poetry, and study botany all at once.
The sort of person who enjoyed codes and ciphers picked up on the flower dictionaries as well. The era was one when anagrams and acrostics were considered not just good fun but fine literature. Other clever languages developed: a language of knots, a language of handkerchiefs, a language of fans, a language of stamps. (In my day, a stamp upside-down on an envelope was still regarded as a signal of distress.)
All of these things were Louis-Aimed at adults. Sarah Josepha Hale, for example, puts her dictionary together to popularize American flower poets. But they rapidly found their audience among teens and pre-teens, especially the girls. A language of flowers was custom-made for those whose romantic inclinations outpaced their ability to do anything concrete about them. Floriography continued to be popular among this audience even after the fashion faded. Flower language fell from adult attention nearly as quickly as it had bloomed. The Victorians became more utilitarian: more “scientific”, they would have said. Flower language was beginning to look silly by the 1860s; it lacked uniformity and horticultural sense.
In 1901, a magazine writer remarked that some truly hideous bouquets would result from floriography, and even if you made up a nice bouquet, you had to be sure your sweetheart was using the same flower dictionary you had. People had moved to the cities, where an interest in flowers was harder to pursue. Flower language was a toy of days past, and to the truly utilitarian mind, such things are expendable. By 1901, there was not one flower language dictionary in print in the United States. (Flower names went out of style at about the same time. A woman named Daisy or Petunia was obviously from out in the sticks.)
For decades, flower language appeared in books mainly as something silly our ancestors used to enjoy. The 1960s saw a rush to flowers, of course, but not to flower language. The flower power folks wanted symbolism and herbalism. That a plant helped bones knit was one thing. That it meant “May I Have Your Hand for the Next Quadrille?” was quite another: irrelevant and possibly counterproductive. Flower language had to wait until people could go back to the pleasures of having a slew of hollyhocks in the yard, a thing the shallower embers of the Flower generation neglected because previous generations had valued it. Flower language started turning up in gift books again in the 1980s, but generally with a touch of condescension. Some history had been lost, and regarding the whole science with a wink and a giggle was the style. (Not, as noted, that the writers of the 1830s were that much more serious about it.)
Do children still keep albums to press flowers in, or is this all done electronically? And do flowers make it into these high-tech memory books? Maybe we should all just shift to a Language of Dinosaurs for the younger set. We could have a dictionary that sets of dinosaur meanings:
BRONTOSAURUS: It Is Going to Rain
APATOSAURUS: It Is Not Going to Rain
ANKYLLOSAURUS: My Ankle Is Sore
ALLOSAURUS: I Am Sore All Over
TYRANNOSAURUS REX: King of My Heart
DIMETRODON: Guys Like You Are a Dime a Dozen
TRICERATOPS: For a really Good Time, Check Out Sarah Stawvik’s Website
Someone could write verses to go with these (And why should a Stegosaurus be less poetic than the Mouse-Eared Scorpion Grass?) and become the Sarah Josepha Hale of this century.
That’s just one of the risks you take in this business. But where were we?
This volume tries to bring the floriographers of the past two centuries together and figure out what they were getting at. About a hundred books were consulted, their similarities and differences compared, to come up with a consensus. This list should show what are the most common meanings for each flower and, where possible, to explain the origin of those meanings.
What use is all of this? Didn’t read that first paragraph, did you?
I suppose one ought to TRY to be fair, even if one is posting material for the Interwebs. This column, some months ago, did suggest that dogs on postcards are primarily concerned with indiscriminate urination. Although you can find a lot of postcards to demonstrate this (I have plenty more you haven’t seen yet), dogs on postcards did many, many other things.
We will set aside any serious postcards involving dogs. We are here concerned with the cartoonists. Our ancestors, who lived in a less sanitary and tidied-up world, were made aware of dogs just about any day, at any time of the day or night. And they were aware of all sorts of other activities a dog might pursue in the day’s schedule. Dogs on postcards sleep in the sun, sniff each other’s backsides (mostly on postcards of the midcentury and later), had sex in public (also primarily mid-century, and then mostly on cards bought at penny arcades), stole food, scratched fleas (especially on all those “Itching to Hear From You” cards). had tin cans tied to their tails (mainly early in the century this time, thank goodness, though the decline in tin can jokes is probably less due to our growing kindness and more to a lack of cans), tore up random toys and other objects, sniffed at the bases of trees and lamp posts, chased cats, chased rats, chase chickens, chased cars, chased their tails, and, especially, chased people.
Bulls and goats will often be found chasing people on postcards, but this was increasingly a rural pursuit (literally.) Dogs, being as urban as people, could be found guarding their home territory (whatever they perceived that to be, in their complex canine craniums) I suspect the dude at the top of this column actually had the dog sicced on him by Annabelle’s father, but in general, no motive is really needed. In the following case, the rather pudgy bulldog may simply have decided that this was quarry he might actually be able to catch.
Ditto this sturdy fellow. There is no immediate or obvious reason for either of these apparently well-to-do passersby offended the dogs on duty (this one, in fact, doesn’t have his jacket on, so he may have been indoors when the chase began.)
Perhaps the dogs involved were sent to pursue a man with the intent of fetching him home. (This is an unusual card in many ways: consider the comparative heights of the woman, the man, and the dog. Make a spot in your nightmare schedule for this trio.)
The job of the watchdog is, of course, to chase away intruders. This chap seems harmless, but someone who had an honest purpose in coming around would head for the gate in this situation. No, the miscreant obviously came into the yard by way of the fence and wants very much to depart the same way.
This man’s clothes and beard mark him as a hobo, a traveling man whose profession, or lack thereof, led him to become familiar with all the dogs along the road. Knowing when and where to run was essential to a long career for such men.
As time went on, of course, even those who believed in having a few canines of mass destruction on hand realized there was a certain fuss and mess involved to letting them run free to pursue any passing suspect. And this is where we start getting the jokes about muzzles and chains.
And, of course, the postcard featuring those really responsible homeowners who raised a sign to warn passersby of the presence of a vicious guard animal.
Blogsy Babbles 