How it works
This Victorian language of flowers translator gives the flower that Kate Greenaway's Language of Flowers lists for a meaning: friendship is acacia, hope is flowering almond, remembrance is rosemary. Swap reads a list of flowers back into meanings.
Read the full guide
A message into flowers
Type feelings and wishes, a word or a short phrase each: friendship, hope, good wishes. Each comes back as the flower the book gives for it. Where the book lists several flowers for one meaning, the first one kept here is written and the others are named in the list.
Flowers into a message
Swap reads flowers back. Type ivy, rosemary and daisy and read fidelity, remembrance and innocence. A flower with several meanings returns the first, and the list under the tool has the rest.
- Color changes the meaning: a rose is love, a yellow rose jealousy, a deep red rose bashful shame.
- Type meanings the way the book words them: thankfulness finds agrimony, and thanks finds nothing.
Questions and answers
What is the Victorian language of flowers?
It is floriography: a message sent through the choice and arrangement of flowers. The Victorian era took a strong interest in it, and printed flower dictionaries gave each flower a meaning. This page reads one of those books.
Which flower means friendship?
Acacia, in this book. It also gives the oak-leaved geranium for true friendship, the blue periwinkle for early friendship and arbor vitae for unchanging friendship.
Which book do the meanings come from?
Every row is a line of Language of Flowers, illustrated by Kate Greenaway and published in London by George Routledge and Sons in 1884. It is in the public domain, and the text was read from Project Gutenberg.
Why are some meanings missing?
Left out, because children use this site: the book's lines about courtship, marriage, death, religion, war, crime, horror, illness and drink, most messages written as I or you, and seven lines unkind to a people or a country. Project Gutenberg has the whole book.