Red roses, boxes of chocolates, love letters, diamond rings…….
Over the ages, lovers have found and invented many symbolic ways to express
their deepest feelings towards someone they love.
One of the most curious and complicated examples of lovers’
language evolved in 18th century Turkey. There, the passionate
sender would assemble an entire ragbag of items; when painstakingly decoded by the
hopeful recipient, they revealed elaborate thoughts and sentiments.
Some of these love packages, secretly delivered by a peddler
woman, could easily be mistaken for wastebaskets. In addition to certain
flowers, with their own traditional meanings, the parcels contained other
objects, such as charcoal (meaning “May I die and you live long”) or wax (“I
perceive that all the ice of your heart cannot diminish the heat of the fire
you have kindled in mine”)
A well-known traveller and letter-writer of the time, Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu, learned about this extraordinary language during her stay
in Constantinople. She wrote to a friend:”There is no colour, no flower, no
weed, no fruit, herb, pebble or feather that has not a verse belonging to it.”
No one seems to know who introduced such language into
Western Europe, but within a few years it had become the craze of fashionable
lovers in Germany, France, and England. By that time, however, the objects had
been eliminated from the packages and only the flowers remained.
Until the end of the 19th century, this romantic
and colourful flower language captivated young and old. Many books were devoted
to the subject, and publishers vied with each other to produce the most
up-to-the–minute dictionary.
One such volume, published in England in 1866, boasted the
inclusion of several new entries and their meanings - including 30 blossoms
from the conservatory and greenhouse, so that lovers would not be “condemned
during the long winter months to floral silence. Unfortunately, the
dictionaries did not always agree on definitions, and decoding a bouquet
involved many potential traps and misunderstandings. For example, it was often
difficult to be certain that the yellow rose meant “infidelity,” and a spray of
orange blossom, “Your purity equals your loveliness.”
By the 1880’s the fashion for using flowers as a language
had died out. Today many would argue even after all these years; red roses are
still given as expressions of love.
And no doubt in a spring meadow somewhere in the world
today, a beautiful woman is stripping petals off daisies while musing”He loves
me, ………He loves me not……. He loves me.”
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