Hand in Hand in the Palace Garden

About this drawing

A royal couple in flowers would have had a lot to read in that garden, because for much of the nineteenth century flowers worked like a secret code. Victorians in Britain and America called it floriography, and it let people say things that polite society preferred to leave unspoken.

Part of the craze traces back to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, an English traveler who wrote home from Constantinople in the early 1700s about messages sent through objects and blossoms. A century later, publishers were turning out flower dictionaries by the dozen, and American readers bought them, too.

The meanings could get surprisingly specific. Roses generally spoke of love, violets of modesty, and rosemary of remembrance. How you handed over a bouquet mattered as well, along with the way you tied it. There was one catch: the dictionaries often disagreed. A sweet message in one book could be a mild insult in another, so a suitor really had to hope both people owned the same edition.

Palace gardens made a fitting backdrop for all this quiet flirting, with their long walks and tidy beds. And the code never fully left us. We still send red roses on Valentine's Day, bring lilies to solemn occasions, and pick out a small bunch when thank you does not feel like enough.

• princes
• princesses
• flowers
• gardens