Something: Language of Flowers

Thursday, May 19, 2022

Language of Flowers

Review of If You Love Me, You Will Find It Out: Mysteries Written in the Language of Flowers

Imagine a walled garden buried deep in the English countryside where every flower or plant has been chosen to send you a message. Now imagine that the person who sent you the message is dead and that the key to deciphering the message has been lost.

Loosely speaking, that’s the idea behind my debut novel, The Walled Garden. (review and description of this book)

Halfway into my novel, I realized I needed a code that two gardeners writing to one another in the 1950s might use. Elizabeth Blackspear, a deeply reserved English poet who’s dealing with a potentially scandalous personal crisis, needs a way to express her feelings to her friend and only confidant, Amanda Silver, in California. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of one person giving another flowers that might appear to onlookers to be just a casual bouquet, but with the power to communicate secrets only the recipient would be able to understand.

That started me off on a deep dive into the intriguing Language of Flowers. Almost any plant—and many I’d never heard of—can be used to send a message, even fruits like apples and peaches. As a gardener myself, I’ve been given copies of The Language of Flowers, including one of the most common, Routledge’s 1884 edition illustrated by Kate Greenaway. Based on Greenaway’s charming drawings of women and children dressed in nineteenth-century finery, I could just imagine some poor frustrated Victorian soul inventing this whole elaborate deal just so he could tell his beloved, “I love you” or “Meet me in the garden at midnight” without sparking scandalous gossip or irreparably compromising his beloved’s reputation, Bridgerton-style.