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The Victorian practice of assigning meanings to flowers — and why it is a poor key to gravestone carving.
Also known as: Victorian flower meanings, Flower symbolism
A nineteenth-century parlour fashion in which flowers were assigned sentimental meanings, published in dozens of competing dictionaries that frequently contradicted one another. It is genuinely historical and genuinely popular, and it is routinely misapplied as though it were a fixed code for reading carved flowers on monuments.
A nineteenth-century European and North American fashion for assigning sentimental meanings to particular flowers, disseminated through published flower dictionaries and used in bouquets, cards and album verses.
Europe and North America · 19th century
The published dictionaries disagreed with one another extensively — the same flower carries different meanings in different books from the same decade — so there was never a single authoritative list even at the height of the fashion.
This is the fact most often omitted. Modern lists presented as 'the' Victorian flower language are a selection from competing sources.
Frequently applied retrospectively to carved flowers on gravestones as though it were a code the mason and family shared. Monument carvers worked from pattern books of decorative motifs, and there is little evidence that either party was consulting a flower dictionary.
Recorded because it is the commonest interpretive error in cemetery symbolism. Some floral motifs do have documented funerary associations; those are recorded on their own pages and do not come from floriography.
Contexts: History
Not a single symbol but a practice: individual flowers — a rose, a lily, a forget-me-not — carved or arranged as though each shape carried a fixed message.