Before there were text messages, before there were letters slipped under doors, there was floriography — the language of flowers.
In Victorian England, a woman could say I love you with a red rose, I am sorry with a purple hyacinth, You have broken my heart with a withered flower sent stem-down. An entire conversation could unfold across a drawing room in a single bouquet.
It began in Constantinople and travelled to England through Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who wrote about the Turkish selam — a coded language of objects, including flowers — in her letters from 1717. By the 1800s, dozens of flower dictionaries had been published, and no proper Victorian lady could afford to be illiterate in petals.
The rules were precise:
A flower given with the right hand meant yes. With the left, no. A flower worn in the hair meant caution. Over the heart — love. A marigold meant grief. A daisy, innocence. Sweet pea, departure. And the forget-me-not — well, the name tells you everything.
What I find extraordinary is not the code itself but the need for it. In an era when women could not speak freely about desire, about longing, about rage — they found a way. They made the garden into a language. They turned beauty into rebellion.
Every time I photograph flowers, I think of them. The women who had to say it with roses because they were not allowed to say it with words.