My daughter is planning her wedding for the first week in September 2000. She would like her 6 attendants to carry an individualized bouquet of a single type of white flower which symbolizes their name or describes their personality. Then my daughter's bouquet would be made up of all 6 types of white flowers. Wonderful idea ... monumental research task! There are a lot of websites that allow searching for color and bloom season, but I can't find one that also has a "cut flower" field. Help! And thanks. (I can be reached at michele_h49@yahoo.com.)

Michele!

I love your daughter's plan! It is so romantic and involves one of my favorite vintage interests, known as 'The Language of Flowers'. The custom is earliest referenced during the Roman Empire and has trickled through the centuries. Cleopatra filled a room knee-deep with rose petals to receive Mark Anthony as a symbol of her love, and Shakespeare used subsequent flower symbolisms in his Elizabethan text.

Botanica-loving Queen Victoria sparked the custom's most recent heyday. Her love of plants and flowers inspired fashionable ladies to include pieces of the garden and woods into their arts and crafts. In the affluent industrial era, servants provided the middleclass with an excess of idle time to indulge in the horticultural pleasures. Gardening-mania was booming, much as it seems to be now. Bouquets and posies filled Victorian homes, which probably inspired the flower language to be used as a secret message code. A posy-note could be composed of particular flowers and leaves to spell out a private message - without the servants reading it when they delivered the bouquet! Besides earlier connotations, all the available flowers and plant foliage of the time where assigned meanings to include virtues and vices as well as phrases to enrich their blooming-mail. Eventually the 'tussie-mussies' became accepted as endearing tokens beyond subterfuge. The symbolically phrased posies would be thank you notes, gossip, well wishing, angry threats, friendship tokens and very often bashful flirting which could lead to nosegays designed to devise clandestine rendezvous!

Like many fine Victorian sentiments, the flower-message custom withered after WWI, with postwar economics. There are a number of published flower language translations available today and the references sometimes disagree … probably due to a regional variance, as happens within a culture's traditions. My favorite book is a reproduction of a handmade volume, made by an Edwardian husband as a birthday gift to his wife in 1913. This modern replication is along the lines of an Edwardian Country Lady's Diary, with handwritten script and delicate watercolor illustrations around age-stained borders. It would be the dearest gift for your daughter's bridesmaids!

The Language of Flowers, published by The Penguin Group, London and New York
copyright maintained by Margaret Pickston

For your daughter's wedding, the language of flowers could be used to describe each of the bridesmaid's virtues, personality or passions in the flowers and foliage of their bouquets. The challenge would be to find the most appropriate bloom for the person as well as considering a flower that could withstand life in a bouquet, and its availability in white. Much of the flower language is also in herbs and other plant foliage, so that could adjunct the flower choices. If you couldn't find a symbolic flower for someone, maybe the bridesmaid could choose her favorite white flower within a bouquet of symbolic foliage.

Here are a few ideas from the above text that might work. I indicate 'white' when the plants' other colors have a different meaning. Also, this edition is the only reference I have found with symbolism for specific types of old roses, rather than just the usual color-coding.

Amaryllis - pride
Aster - variety
Asian lily, white - purity and modesty
Calla lily - magnificent beauty
Chrysanthemum, white - truth
Clematis - mental beauty
Daffodil (white is available) - regard
Dahlia - good taste
Daisy, single white - innocence
Dianthus, white - talent
Gloxinia - a proud spirit
Jasmine, white - amiability
Lily of the Valley - return of happiness (and is till the traditional bloom in English weddings)


Not quite as romantic, but another route might be to use the flowers representing the maids' birth months, but again, all white may not be possible. Another idea might be to find a baby-naming book that lists flowers applied to specific names. Of course that attempt is still limited to very traditional names. I seem to remember the rose listed for 'Margaret', which works out pretty well since 'Ross' is old tongue for 'rose', and the rose is also my birth-month flower. In the simplest language of flowers, rose is for love - and I love them! It would be easy to accommodate me in your daughter's entourage!

My favorite edition above may not be as easily available as more recent releases and reprints, but it would be worth the hunt. Just in case, here are some other titles.

The Language of Flowers: A History, by Beverly Seaton

The Meaning of Flowers, by Ann Field

Tussie-Mussies, The Victorian Art of Expressing Yourself, by Gerladine Adamich Laufer

Flower Fairies: The Meaning of Flowers, by Cicely Mary Barker

Thanks for asking Michele, I enjoyed yaking about one of my loves! and wish you and daughter much fun in the planning and a wonderful wedding day!

Maggie Ross