May Day! May Day!

May 1 was once a day of merriment and rejoicing in England. Families brought armloads of flowers and hawthorn boughs in to decorate the houses, and the prettiest girl in town was crowned Queen of the May. Village lads and lasses danced around a tall pole (the May Pole) in the church yard. There was even a huge May Pole on the Strand in London.

By the nineteenth century, however, that pole was long gone, and most villages had forgotten the customs. May Pole dancing has been reduced to no more than a children’s game at best. But the beginning of May was still a lovely time in England. Flowers burst into bloom. The sun shines more often than not. It wasn’t too surprising for young ladies and gentlemen to use those flowers to communicate.

We’ve touched on the Language of Flowers last year on the blog, but I thought I’d pull out a few more entries in honor of May Day. The basic idea is that each flower, and sometimes its bud or full bloom, represents a different concept, and you could communicate with your loved one through your bouquets. The author of the 1883 Collier’s Cyclopedia of Social and Commercial Information waxes poetic on the subject:

“Flowers have a language all their own. . . How charmingly a young gentleman can speak to a young lady, and with what eloquent silence in this delightful language. How delicately she can respond, the beautiful little flowers telling her tale in perfumed words.”

Perhaps you should see what your garden or your bouquet is saying to you with these spring flowers:

• Cherry blossoms: good education


• Daffodils: regard


• Dogwood: durability


• Bearded iris: flame


• Blue lilacs: humility


• Purple lilacs: first emotions of love


• White lilacs: youthful innocence


• Red tulips: declaration of love


• Yellow tulips: hopeless love


• Variegated tulips: beautiful eyes.

So, does the bouquet on my table of blue lilacs, yellow tulips, and cherry blossoms mean that I have a humble regard for a good education? What else can you make of these?

What Do (May) Flowers Mean?

“April showers bring May flowers.” You wouldn’t know it to look at my garden right now. We’ve had a few more May showers than usual in my part of the Pacific Northwest. I haven’t even had a chance to plant flowers yet, and the raspberries I put in a couple of weeks ago are struggling with our bouncing temperatures.

But flowers had a whole other meaning in the nineteenth century. A seemingly innocent bouquet could spell the difference between a proposal of marriage and an offer to duel to the death. Why? Because of a little thing called The Language of Flowers.

Each flower and plant meant a specific sentiment, and the way you combined them told a story. Wild tansy was a declaration of war. A single rose meant love.

Ah, but it didn’t stop there. Even the kind of rose was meaningful. A white rose declared that the giver was worthy of the one to whom it had been given. A yellow rose stated that love was in decline. Rose buds meant different things than blooming roses, and a rose tree meant something else entirely!

Here’s a few bouquets a young lady might hope to receive from a young gent she fancied:

--Calla lily, a moss rose bud, and green locust: Your beauty is magnificent, and I will love you from now to beyond the grave.
--Dwarf sunflower and peach blossom: I adore you and am captivated by you
--Monkshood and forget me not: My true love, I will be your knight errant.

And here’s a few she’d prefer not to receive:

--China aster: You are but an afterthought
--Japan rose: Beauty is your only attraction
--Spiderwort: I like you, but I’ll never love you.

So, what’s that bouquet on your table really saying?