Victorians studied the language of flowers - Florigraphy - with earnest dedication. The meanings with which florigraphy commonly associates certain plants found their way to us through past human civilizations and are rooted in mythology, religion and medicine. Contributing to the meanings of flowers were legends, folk tales, songs and poems. The actual physical traits of plants and flowers that are universally recognized, as well as original meanings given by early authors were faithfully adhered to. Even the scent and color added meaning.

The first rule in the Language of Flowers is, that a flower, presented in an upright position, expresses a thought; and to express the opposite of that thought, it suffices to let the flower hang down reversed. Thus, for example, a Rose-bud, with its thorns and leaves, says, “I fear, but I hope.” If we present this same Rose-bud, reversed, it means “You must neither fear nor hope.” Stripped of its leaves, it says, “There is everything to fear.” One may also vary the expression of any flower, by altering its position. The Marigold, for instance: placed upon the head, it signifies, sorrows of the mind; placed above the heart, it speaks of the pangs of love; resting upon the breast, it expresses ennui. It must also be remembered that the pronoun of the first person is indicated by inclining the flower to the right; the pronoun of the second person by inclining the flower to the left. Such are the primary elements of our mysterious language. Friendship and affection should join in improving it. These sentiments, the most agreeable and most cherished in Nature, can alone bring to perfection that which they only have invented…
 

Where did it all begin ?

Elizabethans also sometimes concealed messages in their flower choices. It must have been quite common practice then so William Shakespeare (1564–1616) could employ reference to flower meanings and be commonly understood. Ophelia's flower speech in Shakespeare's  Hamlet: " There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember: and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts. [...] There’s fennel for you, and columbines; there’s rue for you; and here’s some for me; we may call it herb of grace o’ Sundays. O! you must wear your rue with a difference. There’s a daisy; I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died. They say he made a good end,— "

People have found meanings in flowers for as long as there have been people on earth. During the excavation of Tutankhamen's burial site, a strangely delicate funeral bouquet was discovered in the tomb sealed up with the dead Pharaoh, for 3500 years. The iris blossom was used as an emblem of power on the brow of the Sphinx of Giza and on the scepter of most Egyptian monarchs. To ancient Romans, anemones signified love and were strewn on the altars of Venus; myths tell us that these flowers sprang up where Venus shed tears at the loss of her beloved Adonis. In the classical world, verbena was considered a symbol of peace and was present at the signing of treaties, A hint of the ancients' attitude toward the war between the sexes lies in their use of verbena at weddings! At least as early as the Middle Ages, people noticed a resemblance to the dove in the spurred, tubular petals of the columbine; as the dove stands for the Holy Spirit, so does the dove-like columbine that appears in Renaissance paintings.

In the Orient, during what we term the Baroque period, the language of flowers rose to new sophistication, and it is generally believed that the practice of systematically assigning meanings to flowers was brought back from here to the public eye of Europe by Lady Mary Wortley Montague (‘the most colourful Englishwoman of her time', according to Encyclopedia Brittanica) in 1763 when her letters were posthumously published. Lady Wortley Montague was the wife of the British ambassador to Constantinople, but, more importantly, she was a poet and writers of letters. Writing to a lady friend in 1717 who had requested a "Turkish love letter," Lady Montague provides a sample verse:

Ingi Sensin uzellerin gingi

Pearl Fairest of the young..

Put Derdime derman but

Jonquil Have pity on my passion

Gui Ben aglarurn Sen gui

A rose May you be pleased, and your sorrows mine

She goes on to say: "There is no colour, no flower, no weed, no fruit, herb, pebble, or feather that has not a verse belonging to it; and you may quarrel, reproach, or send letters of passion, friendship, or civility, or even of news, without ever inking your fingers."

The letter further outlined the meanings of some flowers and plants. Lady Wortley Montague touted this form of communication for its subtlety and refinement and praised the practice as conveying dignity even whilst delivering the most unpleasant of messages.

The French were to universally take a keen interest in the flower lore next. A French woman, with the pen name of Madame Charlotte de la Tour (Louise Cortambert), authored the original source-book, "Le Language des Fleurs" in 1819. The book provided a seasonal listing of flowers by name with selected anecdotes. It was subsequently reprinted 18 times.

In England, interest was kindled after Queen Victoria assumed the throne (birth 1819; coronation 1837; death 1901). The new floral language appealed to the Romantic poets in England. "Sweet flowers alone can say what passion fears revealing," noted the poet Thomas Hood (1799-1885) in his poem "The Language of Flowers." A Victorian lady, Miss Corruthers of Inverness, wrote an entire book on the subject in 1879. Her book became the standard source for flower symbolism both in England and finally the United States where the vogue took hold a little later.

In those days, what we think of as Victorian manners and morals - stringent and girdled by high-handed judgments - prevailed also among people who had freshly acquired some means and leisure and subsequently the desire to lead genteel lives, but often lacked the requisite knowledge.

With the 'proper' assistance of flower-language books, Victorians, inexperienced in societal skills formerly reserved for the gentry, were able to find ways to express what they could not put in word. "A party walking in a garden," the author of one of these books proclaims, "through the means of flowers presented to each other, may carry on a conversation of compliment, wit, and repartee." By the keenly felt lack of 'upper-class' breeding, the burgeoning middle-class embraced these aspired-to sensibilities with solemn fervor. It was a time where gentility was valued like never before (or again).

When looking on the many original flower dictionaries written over a span of over sixty years and the sometimes diverging meanings assigned to the same flower over time, one finds oneself marveling at how people actually dared to communicate via flowers, yet one must not forget that each country and each region and each decade had its own evolving favorite meanings for certain flowers.

We are not in the flow of it and look at the historical sum with apprehension. Just like humor is often a child of its time and lost on later generations, so is the evolution of the flower language tied to the passing of its years. We may hold romanticized notions about Victorian florigraphy but the true sense lies with the people who lived it. What then is left to us ... is to start it all over again and create a fresh sense of flower meanings for our time.
 

The Tussi-Mussi

The term tussi-mussi or tuzzy-muzzy, used for scented nosegays, dates back to the 1500s. The word "tuzzy" refers to the Old English word which means a "knot of flowers". Muzzy refers to the damp moss wrapped around the stems to keep them moist. Towns and dwellings in the Elizabethan era were unsanitary. For those Elizabethans who could not afford the expensive resin pomanders or enough cloves for cloved fruit to keep off "noxious odors", small bouquets of aromatic astringent herbs like sage, rosemary and rue, as well as flowers such as roses and violets served instead as aromatic distractions from the stench that beast and man left in the streets and rivers.

Over time, sanitation improved and the tussi-mussi stayed. Before the invention of "posy holders" the flowers did not last long and were cumbersome during dining or dancing. Jewelers rivaled one another in making these holders to alleviate the problem. Many were quite ornate and there was a wide variety of shapes and styles. Bosom bottles were tucked into the decolletage of a dress. Tiny holders were also worn at the waist , in the hair, or secured with a brooch, and others again were tripod posy holders able to be placed on a table before or after an event.

There were two styles of the "tussie-mussie"----formal and informal. The formal nosegays had concentric rows of flowers with a rose or other fragrant symbolic flower in the center. Rows of flowers, leaves and herbs formed tight rings around this central flower. Informal "tussie-mussies" were more casually arranged.

For a refreshing look at the Victorians and their time, we can recommend this book:

Inventing The Victorians

by Matthew Sweet

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; (December 2001)
• ISBN: 0312283261
   
• Editorial Reviews
  From Publishers Weekly
  "Commonly perceived as stodgy, stern, pious, humorless and deeply repressed, Victorians are frequently invoked in contemporary society as embodiments of everything their more liberated descendants are not. But this perception, Sweet suggests, is far from accurate. Noting that our image of the Victorians is based on a very selective range of materials, Sweet, a British writer, argues that we have almost willfully developed a distorted idea of 19th-century society largely in order to flatter ourselves with the belief that our own age is far more enlightened. Working with a wide-ranging array of documents letters, diaries, newspapers, novels and plays Sweet sets out to prove that the Victorians not only were in some ways more progressive, more sophisticated and less neurotic than we are, they also had a lot more fun than we give them credit for. To that end, he leads readers on a whirlwind tour through the more outr, aspects of Victorian life and culture, demonstrating that the 19th century was in many respects as much an era of thrill-seeking, sexual liberation and social upheaval as our own time. While he's arguably as selective in his own source materials and interpretations as are those whose perspective he seeks to debunk, Sweet does paint a more complex picture of the Victorians than we're used to seeing; this is a lively, entertaining trip through a side of 19th-century society most of us are probably unfamiliar with."

And an additional view about Victorians and their time from the George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University   ...

" Popular ideas about the Victorians and attitudes toward their age change as it recedes into the past. Modern writers who were trying to free themselves from the massive embrace of their predecessors often saw the Victorians chiefly as repressed, over-confident, and thoroughly philistine.

The confidence certainly was there! As Robert Furneaux Jordan points out, "The architecture of the Victorian Age tells us more about the men who made it than does any other architecture in history. It made such very definite statements about life; it was all so self-assured and vulgar, that it never leaves us in doubt. It never diluted itself -- as has our architecture -- with inhibitions about style or taste. The Victorian architect knew what he wanted to do and, good or bad, he did it.

Robert Furneaux Jordan also points out that popular notions of Victorian life as cosy and picturesque hardly fit the hurly burly of Victorian reality: That earnest world of Tractarian parsons and Oxford common-rooms, that world of Hardy's peasants buried deep in English shires, did really exist. Of course it did. But it was not very important. By and large Victorian England was a tremendously virile and very terrible affair. If we strip away the gadgets and fashions, Victorian England was not unlike the United States today. There was the same unblinking worship of independence and of hard cash; there was the same belief in institutions -- patriotism, democracy, individualism, organized religion, philanthropy, sexual morality, the family, capitalism and progress; the same overwhelming self-confidence, with its concomitant -- a novel and adventurous architecture. And, at the core, was the same tiny abscess -- the nagging guilt as to the inherent contradiction between the morality and the system."

A Brief Biography Of Queen Victoria

Victoria, the daughter of the duke of Kent and Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg, was born in 1819. She inherited the throne of Great Britain at the age of eighteen, upon the death of her uncle William IV in 1837, and reigned until 1901, bestowing her name upon her age. She married her mother's nephew, Albert (1819-1861), prince of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, in 1840, and until his death he remained the focal point of her life (she bore him nine children). Albert replaced Lord Melbourne, the Whig Prime Minister who had served her as her first personal and political tutor and instructor, as Victoria's chief advisor. Albert was moralistic, conscientious and progressive, if rather priggish, sanctimonious, and intellectually shallow, and with Victoria initiated various reforms and innovations -- he organized the Great Exhibition of 1851, for example -- which were responsible for a great deal of the popularity later enjoyed by the British monarchy.

 In contrast to the Great Exhibition, housed in the Crystal Palace and viewed by proud Victorians as a monument to their own cultural and technological achievements, however, we may recall that the government over which Victoria  - albeit without peremptory royal powers - presided had, in the midst of the potato famine of 1845, continued to permit the export of grain and cattle from Ireland to England while over a million Irish peasants starved to death.

With the death of Prince Albert on Dec. 14, 1861, the Albertine monarchy came to an end. Albert's influence on the queen was lasting. He had changed her personal habits and her political sympathies. From him she had received training in orderly ways of business, in hard work, in the expectation of royal intervention in ministry making at home, and in the establishment of a private (because royal) intelligence service abroad. The English monarchy had changed. As the historian G.M. Young said, "In place of a definite but brittle prerogative it had acquired an undefinable but potent influence."
Victoria's genuine but obsessive mourning, which would occupy her for the rest of her life, played an important role in the evolution of what would become the Victorian mentality. Thereafter she lived at Windsor or Balmoral, travelling abroad once a year, but making few public appearances in Britain itself. Although she maintained a careful policy of official political neutrality, she did not get on at all well with Gladstone. Eventually, however, she succumbed to the flattery of Disraeli, and permitted him (in an act which was both symbolic and theatrical) to have her crowned Empress of India in 1876. (As the political paper Punch noted at the time, "one good turn deserves another," and Victoria reciprocated by making Disraeli Earl of Beaconsfield.) She tended as a rule to take an active dislike of British politicians who criticized the conduct of the conservative regimes of Europe, many of which were, after all, run by her relatives.

By 1870 her popularity was at its lowest ebb (at the time the monarchy cost the nation £400,000 per annum, and many wondered whether the largely symbolic institution was worth the expense), but it increased steadily thereafter until her death. Her golden jubilee in 1887 was a grand national celebration, as was her diamond jubilee in 1897 (by then, employing the imperial "we," she had long been Kipling's "Widow of Windsor," mother of the Empire).

She died, a venerable old lady, at Osborne on January 22, 1901, having reigned for sixty-four years.