Floriography
A blue hydrangea meant frigidity in 1884 and gratitude now. The language of flowers turns out to be a mistranslated pun, and ninety-eight dictionaries have been arguing about it ever since.
There is a hydrangea on the way to my studio that I have been avoiding for six years.
Not the house. The hydrangea.
It did nothing. It is a shrub. It has no idea.
Blue hydrangeas were her favourite, and somewhere in there they stopped being a flower and started being a person, which is an enormous amount of work to ask of a plant that was only trying to get a bee’s attention.
This is the going rate, though. Objects get conscripted. A song is a song until it is a car park in 2017. A jacket becomes an argument. A perfume becomes eighteen months. None of them are consulted, none of them are compensated, and you cannot take it up with them afterwards, because they are objects, and I have now lost the same argument to a shrub every week for six years.
The Victorians printed the dictionary. Kate Greenaway’s Language of Flowers, 1884, still in print, still quoted at weddings by people who have not read it.
In it, a blue hydrangea means frigidity. Coldness, vanity, boastfulness. The flower you sent a woman who turned you down.
Walk into a florist in 2026 and the same bloom means gratitude. Thank you.
Twice in a hundred and forty years, and then again in me.
White marries you on Saturday and buries you on Sunday, two hundred metres apart.
Red for any occasion.
Black for death, unless you’re the couple at the goth wedding, and then it’s the most a flower has ever carried.
Colour, count, ratio. On a table or on a lid.
The poppy isn’t one flower.
Papaver rhoeas comes up out of churned ground. That is what it does to disturbed soil, which is the only reason it was in Flanders to be noticed in 1915.
Papaver somniferum is Turkish. Morphine, codeine, heroin.
Different stem. Different leaf. A seed head twice the size.
Australians went into Uruzgan in 2006 and stayed until 2013. The UN put the province’s opium at record levels in 2006, and again in 2007, with nobody much eradicating anything.
Afghanistan sent its harvest to Europe. American heroin is Mexican. Ours comes up through the Golden Triangle, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore. In 2022 the Taliban banned the crop and Myanmar took the title off them the year after.
The flower on Anzac Day isn’t the poppy anyway. It’s rosemary, and the reason is that rosemary grows wild on the Gallipoli peninsula.
There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.
Ophelia hands them out by the book in 1601, pansies for thoughts, and drowns wearing them.
A sprig on a lapel in Brunswick because of what grows on a Turkish headland.
A white chrysanthemum in Tokyo is the imperial seal. Long life, a festival, the throne.
In Milan you put it on a grave on the first of November.
Somewhere over the Mediterranean it stops being a blessing.
Elizabeth Short was killed in Los Angeles in January 1947 and the papers called her the Black Dahlia, after The Blue Dahlia, a film that had come out the year before.
Black dahlias don’t exist. The colour isn’t available to the plant.
Neither is blue, to a rose. Roses cannot make delphinidin. There is no gene for it, which is the entire reason a blue rose has meant the impossible thing for as long as anyone has been counting.
So in 2009 Suntory and Florigene spent twenty years and about ¥3 billion borrowing a gene from a pansy to build one, and called it Applause, and put it on sale.
It came out mauve.
Twenty-six million dollars to demolish a metaphor, and the flower is lilac, and they sell it as blue.
Violets have meant women who love women since Sappho wrote them on Lesbos in the sixth century BC. Paris wore them in the twenties. When police shut down The Captive on Broadway in 1926, a play where the whole affair is conducted through bunches of violets, women wore violets to the trial.
Jeanne Baret collected six thousand specimens on Bougainville’s voyage between 1766 and 1769, dressed as a man, because French law would not let a woman on the ship. She is the first woman to go round the world. In Rio she is thought to have found the flowering vine.
It is called bougainvillea, after the man whose boat it was.
Royal FloraHolland at Aalsmeer moves around 90 billion stems a year. Eleven flowers for every person alive.
464 million of them went through in the fortnight before Valentine’s Day this year.
Kenya grows most of Europe’s roses and flies 67% of its tonnage to the Netherlands to be auctioned by clock, in a building you could fit the meaning of a flower into several hundred thousand times over.
The dictionary is a mishearing.
In 1717 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu watched women in Constantinople play selam and wrote home about it. Objects wrapped in a handkerchief, each one standing for a line of verse. She took it for a symbolic language, lovers talking under the nose of the household.
It was a rhyme. Armoude, pear. Omoude, hope. The pear meant hope because the words sounded alike, and for no other reason. Closer to a memory trick than a code, and it cannot survive being translated, because nothing rhymes in two languages at once.
Her letters were published in 1763 and Europe built the thing on the misheard part.
The first dictionary came in 1819, in French. Le Langage des Fleurs, by Louise Cortambert, writing as Charlotte de Latour.
Between 1827 and 1923 there were at least 98 of them in circulation in America alone. They contradicted each other constantly. Meanings came from myth, from folk medicine, from tradition, and from the active imagination of whoever was writing that particular dictionary.
Hate and love are words we use too much.
A bruise on the neck, blue going purple, can mean both.
Blue, enormous, far too much, and still out the front of that house.
There are also poems.