A Brief Overview of Floriography written by Julia San Miguel
With Valentine’s Day coming up, the iconic red rose prepares for its biggest day of the year. In 2022 alone, around 250 million roses were produced for the amorous holiday (that’s more than the populations of Canada, the UK, and Mexico combined). Red roses signify undying love in cultures around the world, and the rose is the most popular flower grown globally. However, the rose is not a symbol of love everywhere. In China, flowers are traditionally only given at funerals or in times of mourning. In Catalonia, roses are gifted during the Feast of Saint George, to commemorate their patron saint who slew a dragon and watched a rose come from its blood. Needless to say, flowers have a language of their own, which can differ across the map. While this tradition has mostly died out, in the 1800s, floriography was all the rage. Floriography, literally the language of flowers, can be attributed to a dogmatic love for tulips in Constantinople. This tulipmania was noticed by English aristocrat and poet, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, while on an extended visit to the Ottoman Empire. She brought this idea back to Europe, where flower language began to take shape and expand.