Looking Back: Do we realise how important flowers are in our lives?
It’s amazing how much a part of our lives flowers have become. Flowers in gardens, in tubs and hanging baskets and in parks and shopping centres. One most enduring custom has to be the sending of flowers. There is nothing like answering the door to be greeted with a beautiful bouquet of flowers. ‘I haven’t enough vases’ we say happily!
I can’t remember my mother receiving flowers when I was a child. They were considered a real luxury. But she would pick them from the garden to put in vases. They were always cottage garden types like lupins, iris, daffodils and roses. My sister and I often picked bluebells in the woods, placing them in a jam jar where they quickly died!
The idea of Interflora dates from the 1920s when a UK florist, Joe Dobson joined a nurseryman called Carl Englemann in the Florists Transworld Delivery, formally only operating from America. This name existed up to 1953 until it became Interflora.
Flowers say, ‘I Love You’ ‘Congratulations’ and ‘I’m Sorry’ They are sent in times of joy and sadness and can totally uplift the spirits.
The Victorians believed that they were a romantic symbol to express feelings. The language of flowers was called Floriography. It originated in 17th century Turkey when Turks developed flower meanings for concubine women who could not read or write to communicate with each other.
In 1718 the wife of the British Ambassador to Constantinople, Lady Mary Wortley, wrote a letter expounding on the secret language of flowers.
Lady Mary, a noted academic, had many links to our area. Her father owned Thorsby Hall, in Nottinghamshire, and to escape marriage with a suitor of her father’s choice, she eloped in 1712 with Edward Wortley Montagu who inherited Wortley Hall, near Barnsley in South Yorkshire.
William Shakespeare mentioned more than 100 flowers in his writings with Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte all using the language of flowers in their books.
As time and communication has progressed, the language of flowers has largely disappeared and although everyone knows that the red rose means ‘I Love You’, it seems that 108 red roses means ‘Will you marry me?’
How could you refuse a man who spent so much money on you?