Glossa Hortensia

Speak to me in flowers.

[glossahortensia]

GLOSSA HORTENSIA

What is this?

Glossa Hortensia is an online, in-depth encyclopaedia of floriography, better known as the language of flowers.

Rising to prominence in Western Europe and colonial European North America in the 19th century (the 1800s), floriography - from the Latin flora, meaning 'flower', and -graphy, meaning 'writing': 'flower-writing' - encoded different flowers with specific meanings, often drawn from famous poetry, ancient religions, and other pre-existing cultural symbolism such as folk tales, songs, or borrowing from 'exotic' cultures.

Over the century (and continuing today) many hundreds of books were likely published on the topic in all different languages, offering dictionaries of this flower-language for such varied purposes as sending secret messages to a lover, illustrating a memorial or invite for a special occasion, or even letter-for-letter ciphers and phonetic alphabets illustrated with flowers. While many of these books were intended as gifts or tokens for light entertainment, contemporary scholars such as Dr Brent Elliott of the Lindley Library and the late Beverly Seaton (may she rest in peace) have dedicated extensive work to examining their importance as manifestations of cultural movements of the time, including, but far from limited to, Orientalism, the growing push for women's education, the gradual secularisation of society, and the English Arts and Crafts movement which would later yield Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and the folk revival movements of the 20th century.

While much of this trend has been forgotten, there remains a fascination with floriography for contemporary audiences. This encyclopaedia aims to provide an academic-level lens on the language of flowers, building on other scholars' work, and creating a repository of botanical and cultural resources to inform a contemporary reader. In each entry, I go back to the source of the emblem and sentiment applied to it, confirm its botanical identity, provide the texts as they appear in the original works, and chase these back to their origins in poetry, myth, religion, and culture of the time.

This blog will provide updates as I add them to the main glossa.

Who are you?

I am Nev, an Australian writer, artist and gardener in my 30s. While I have a background in academia, I am no longer engaged in it professionally - I do this because I am driven to. Nonetheless, I hope one day I can publish this as a book, or transition it into a masters by research.

Why?

Frustration. I got sick of being unable to find the information I wanted in this sphere without wading through lies, ads for health supplements, and paywalls. All these texts are public domain; I am just doing the archival and the research. Some things we are driven to do.

Ask box is open. Catch you later.

[salmon-n-hazel]

Clover and daisy

My print shop: INPRNT

[nemfrog]

Yellow onion. The Florist and pomologist. 1877.

Internet Archive

[salmon-n-hazel]

Dandelions

My print shop: INPRNT

[jadeseadragon]

Thaddeus Welch (American, 1844 - 1919), Nasturtiums.

[glossahortensia]

‘Al Aaraaf’, Frederick Simpson Coburn, in The Works of Edgar Allan Poe Vol. I, Philadelphia: John D. Morris & Company (1902) p.30 Internet Archive. Extracted by Glossa Hortensia 2026. Read the poem here.

[glossahortensia]

Mad Honey I: Attended With Deliriums (Rhododendron)

RHODODENDRON Harmful if eaten. Genus Rhododendron L. (1753).

Period English: rhododendron. R. maximum: rosebay rhododendron.

Period French: rododendron m.; rosage m. (up to the 18th century). R. maximum: grand rododendron m. (‘great rhododendron’).

Period German: Alpenrose f. (‘alpine rose’); Alpenbalsam m. (‘alpine balsam’); Rosenbaum m. (‘rose tree’). R. maximum: Grosse Alpenrose f. (‘great alpine rose’).

Sentiments: Danger You are in danger Danger is near Agitation Distress

R. maximum: Dignity in misfortune Danger Beware

Rhododendrons are one of those plants, of which there are a number, that excite incredible passion in a certain kind of person. Such plants generally have the following qualities: they have large, showy, colourful flowers; they have luscious, often dark foliage; they have innumerable varieties; and they are at first brush hardy and fairly easy to grow, however to grow with excellence they require incredible care and attention to detail. Roses, dahlias, camellias, rhododendrons. It doesn’t end there of course - I know Philodendron fanciers, orchid fanciers, clover fanciers, and I am crazy about carnivorous plants myself - but nonetheless a rhododendron can take a hold of someone in a way other plants rarely can.

Here in Victoria we have the Dandenong Ranges Botanic Garden in Olinda, formerly the National Rhododendron Garden - I understand that the Australian Rhododendron Society (ARS) established the garden upon their founding in 1960, and it still boasts a huge collection of rhododendrons and azaleas (which are Rhododendron species by another name), including some very rare native species, such as R. viriosum and R. lochiae, recently obtained from mountain tops in North Queensland.

Another rhododendron fancier of fame was the British banker Lionel Nathan de Rothschild, known by regular people for literally everything else apart from rhododendrons, but whom within the hobby is known for his horticultural passions instead. Drawn to azaleas, when he purchased his Exbury estate in Hampshire in 1919, he set his great wealth and influence to their pursuit, sponsoring missions to the Himalayas to collect new varieties and creating over a thousand new hybrids. The collection and the estate endure, and I am advised are considered splendid to this day.

This matter, of rhododendron fancying, is complicated by the toxicity of the plants. It is this characteristic, the poison within these beautiful flowers, that makes them the emblem of danger in Victorian language of flower books. Like many of these sentiments, this appears quite straightforward, but this is not the end of the story. The reason rhododendrons are emblematic of danger, say our authors, goes back to antiquity.

Mad Honey

In my naïveté, I had assumed the rhododendron was called such after Cecil Rhodes, one of history’s great villains, who I had supposed was himself a rhododendron fancier. Not so - and it does not appear to stem from the island of Rhodes, either.

The word is mentioned as far back as Pliny the Elder (this guy again!), and is a combination of ῥόδον (rhódon, ‘rose’) and δένδρον (déndron, ‘tree’). There is restrained debate about what plants Pliny was actually speaking to, as he uses two different words to refer to apparently interchangeable plants: ῥοδόδενδρον, rhodódendron, and αἰγόλεθρος, ægolethron, meaning ‘goat’s bane’. The opinion of the Victorians, as it seems to be of classicists today, was that he meant by the former Nerium oleander, the oleander or rosebay, and by the latter the Pontic rhododendron, Rhododendron ponticum. As both flowers are similar in appearance, toxicity and range, this conflation is natural enough.

Zwei Mädchen mit Oleander, painting by Gustav Klimt (1892) via Wikimedia.

For the full story with Pliny the Elder on rhododendrons, oleander and 'mad honey', and Xenophon writing on an illness that befell the mercenary Ten Thousand after gorging on honey on their return from Babylonia in 401 BCE, read on at my Substack.

Mad Honey I: Attended With Deliriums (Rhododendron)

An ancient mercenary army stricken by 'a voiding upwards and downwards' at Trebizond pins the blame on the rhododendron - and the sentiment

[nemfrog]

Auricula or mountain cowslip. Temple of Flora. 1812. Robert John Thornton.

Internet Archive

[glossahortensia]

Mad Honey II: Orientalism, Lalla Rookh, and Deli Bal

Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh inspires a generation of Orientalists to 'mad honey' metaphors, and an old friend returns, 1,700 years after we thought we were done...

Ev'n as those bees of Trebizond,—  Which from the sunniest flowers that glad With their pure smile the gardens round,  Draw venom forth that drives men mad! — ‘The Fire-Worshippers’, Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh.

Sur les langage des fleurs

Here, then, we leave the ancient world behind and forge into the bright realms of the Industrial Revolution, where the yet young science of botany collides with the language of flowers - the shadow of Orientalism, the fascination Western Europe held for the lands to their east, cast long across it.

In our world of floriography, this manifests itself in its alleged origin - I understand considered fantastical by today’s academics, but I am yet to consult with the data in its strictest sense - in the harems of the Ottoman Empire. The earliest example of floriography, at least commonly cited, is in the letters of Englishwoman Mary Wortley Montagu while abroad in Ottoman Turkey, published without her consent the year after her death in 1763, and causing a sensation at the time for her criticism of Catholicism and interest in Islam. Writing to another lady in her ‘Letter XL’, Wortley Montagu explained:

I have got for you, as you desire, a Turkish love-letter, which I have put into a little box, and ordered the captain of the Smyrniote to deliver it to you with this letter. The translation of it is literally as follows: The first piece you should pull out of the purse, is a little Pearl, which is in Turkish called Ingi, and must be understood in this manner: Ingri, Sensin Uzellerin gingi Pearl, Fairest of the young. Caremfil, Caremfilsen cararen yōk      Congе̄ gulsum timarin yōk      Benseny chok than severim      Senin benden, baberin yōk Clove,  You are as slender as this clove!     You are an unblown rose!     I have long loved you, and you have not known it!

But you will note that the pearl is not a flower, and she goes on to give similar verses for a jonquil, paper, pear, soap, coal, a rose, a straw, cloth, cinnamon, a match, gold thread, hair, a grape, gold wire, and pepper, noting that there is barely a flower, fabric, or item that does not have a verse attached to it.

This appears to have been overlooked in its day, and it is only with the 1800s that we see it surface in earnest - I have located a French letter from 1806 which I believe might be an earlier example, but apart from that, the first mention of a langage des fleurs we encounter is another piece alleged to come from the harems of the Ottoman Empire, this time from Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, in his contribution to 1809’s Fundgruben des Orients, ‘Sur les langage des fleurs’, has similar, if expanded, content to Montagu:

In Hammer-Purgstall’s langage des fleurs, the emblems are indicated with a rhyme both in Turkish as in French. Like Montagu, Hammer-Purgstall’s emblems are not all flowers, despite his proclaimed ‘dictionnaire du langage des fleurs’; he also includes, among yet more examples, a thread, needle, palm of the hand, an arrow, flour, silk, a skein of white silk, a coin, a sequin, a cloud, chalk, wire, salt, a brick, ambergris, feathers, bread, paper, and honey.

None of which are flowers, and none of which survived the transfer over into the European language of flowers proper. In English, even the alleged Turkish origins of floriography ceased to be referenced with time, but in some emblems they remained, and so it was with the rhododendron - and that brings us once again to the start of the century, and Thomas Moore.

Read more on Lalla Rookh, Edgar Allan Poe, Tournefort and Lamberti on the substack. Part I is here, on the ancient writing on 'mad honey'.

Mad Honey II: Ev'n as those bees of Trebizond (Rhododendron)

Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh inspires a generation of Orientalists to 'mad honey' metaphors, and an old friend returns, 1,700 years after we t

[glossahortensia]

‘Al Aaraaf’, Frederick Simpson Coburn, in The Works of Edgar Allan Poe Vol. I, Philadelphia: John D. Morris & Company (1902) p.30 Internet Archive. Extracted by Glossa Hortensia 2026. Read the poem here.

[glossahortensia]

Mad Honey I: Attended With Deliriums (Rhododendron)

RHODODENDRON Harmful if eaten. Genus Rhododendron L. (1753).

Period English: rhododendron. R. maximum: rosebay rhododendron.

Period French: rododendron m.; rosage m. (up to the 18th century). R. maximum: grand rododendron m. (‘great rhododendron’).

Period German: Alpenrose f. (‘alpine rose’); Alpenbalsam m. (‘alpine balsam’); Rosenbaum m. (‘rose tree’). R. maximum: Grosse Alpenrose f. (‘great alpine rose’).

Sentiments: Danger You are in danger Danger is near Agitation Distress

R. maximum: Dignity in misfortune Danger Beware

Rhododendrons are one of those plants, of which there are a number, that excite incredible passion in a certain kind of person. Such plants generally have the following qualities: they have large, showy, colourful flowers; they have luscious, often dark foliage; they have innumerable varieties; and they are at first brush hardy and fairly easy to grow, however to grow with excellence they require incredible care and attention to detail. Roses, dahlias, camellias, rhododendrons. It doesn’t end there of course - I know Philodendron fanciers, orchid fanciers, clover fanciers, and I am crazy about carnivorous plants myself - but nonetheless a rhododendron can take a hold of someone in a way other plants rarely can.

Here in Victoria we have the Dandenong Ranges Botanic Garden in Olinda, formerly the National Rhododendron Garden - I understand that the Australian Rhododendron Society (ARS) established the garden upon their founding in 1960, and it still boasts a huge collection of rhododendrons and azaleas (which are Rhododendron species by another name), including some very rare native species, such as R. viriosum and R. lochiae, recently obtained from mountain tops in North Queensland.

Another rhododendron fancier of fame was the British banker Lionel Nathan de Rothschild, known by regular people for literally everything else apart from rhododendrons, but whom within the hobby is known for his horticultural passions instead. Drawn to azaleas, when he purchased his Exbury estate in Hampshire in 1919, he set his great wealth and influence to their pursuit, sponsoring missions to the Himalayas to collect new varieties and creating over a thousand new hybrids. The collection and the estate endure, and I am advised are considered splendid to this day.

This matter, of rhododendron fancying, is complicated by the toxicity of the plants. It is this characteristic, the poison within these beautiful flowers, that makes them the emblem of danger in Victorian language of flower books. Like many of these sentiments, this appears quite straightforward, but this is not the end of the story. The reason rhododendrons are emblematic of danger, say our authors, goes back to antiquity.

Mad Honey

In my naïveté, I had assumed the rhododendron was called such after Cecil Rhodes, one of history’s great villains, who I had supposed was himself a rhododendron fancier. Not so - and it does not appear to stem from the island of Rhodes, either.

The word is mentioned as far back as Pliny the Elder (this guy again!), and is a combination of ῥόδον (rhódon, ‘rose’) and δένδρον (déndron, ‘tree’). There is restrained debate about what plants Pliny was actually speaking to, as he uses two different words to refer to apparently interchangeable plants: ῥοδόδενδρον, rhodódendron, and αἰγόλεθρος, ægolethron, meaning ‘goat’s bane’. The opinion of the Victorians, as it seems to be of classicists today, was that he meant by the former Nerium oleander, the oleander or rosebay, and by the latter the Pontic rhododendron, Rhododendron ponticum. As both flowers are similar in appearance, toxicity and range, this conflation is natural enough.

Zwei Mädchen mit Oleander, painting by Gustav Klimt (1892) via Wikimedia.

For the full story with Pliny the Elder on rhododendrons, oleander and 'mad honey', and Xenophon writing on an illness that befell the mercenary Ten Thousand after gorging on honey on their return from Babylonia in 401 BCE, read on at my Substack.

Mad Honey I: Attended With Deliriums (Rhododendron)

An ancient mercenary army stricken by 'a voiding upwards and downwards' at Trebizond pins the blame on the rhododendron - and the sentiment

[glossahortensia]

Archival Poetry Spotlight: In René Rapin’s 1665 Latin poem Hortorum Libri IV (Gardens in Four Books), he describes the Passion of Christ seen by Christians in the American ‘granadilla’, later to be known in English as the ‘passionflower’ for exactly this belief.

James Gardiner the Younger translated the poem into English in 1706, where he gives this interpretation of the Latin:

When Carl Linnaeus was compiling his binomial classification system of life - the basis of what we now often refer to as ‘scientific names’ - he quoted this Latin poem under his entry for the Latin ‘Passiflora’ - ‘passion flower’ - that he gave the genus of these flowers. He also refers to a Latin epigram given by Spanish Jesuit Juan Eusebio Nieremberg y Ottín in his 1635 Historia Naturæ, the original of which includes this woodcut, illustrating the symbols they saw in the flower.

[glossahortensia]

COPIOUS DEJECTIONS

SQUIRTING CUCUMBER Ecballium elaterium (L.) A.Rich. (1824); = Momordica elaterium L. (1753). Period English: squirting cucumber. Period French: concombre d’âne m. (‘donkey cucumber’); concombre d’attrape m. (‘trap cucumber’). Juice: élatérion. Period German: Eselsgurke f. (‘donkey cucumber’); Springgurke f. (‘leaping cucumber’); Vexirgurke f. (‘trick cucumber’?). Ancient Greek:Juice: ἐλατήριον n. (elatḗrion). Ancient Latin:Juice: elatērium n. Sentiments: English:Critic Criticism Critique Mystification

German: Scherz (‘Joke’) Tadelsucht (‘Reproachfulness’) Ueberraschung (‘Surprise’)

Rough and powerful cathartic medicine

The squirting cucumber is but a humble plant. Its flowers are small, its agricultural uses limited, its habit spindly and sprawling, and its fruits little, hairy and unappealing. They also explode, with the ballistic seeds ejecting violently from the fruits at speeds of up to 20 metres per second and flying around 10 metres from the plants.

It is best one witnesses this for oneself, so rather than try to explain it, here’s David Attenborough (happy 100th, mate) showing you how this works with some impressive slow motion footage of the disgusting ejection.

Reviewing particular images for this article, I must say I was struck by how horrible all of them make this phenomena look.

There’s something about those gooey seeds spraying out of a tiny circular hole that is just terribly unwholesome to look at. Incredible, though.

This explains the three German sentiments - Scherz (‘joke’), Tadelsucht (‘reproachfulness’) and Ueberraschung (‘surprise’) - but to uncover the meaning of the English sentiment of ‘critic’, we must go to its source.

More about the squirting cucumber and its troublesome medical history on the Glossa Hortensia Substack today.

I note this includes information about animal testing of the 19th century, so feel welcome to give it a miss if you don't want to hear about that.

Copious Dejections (Squirting Cucumber)

The 'therapeutic' use of this fantastic vegetable's explosive, poisonous emissions lead to its comparison with arts critics in Victorian flo

[glossahortensia]

✨ Victorian Era Title Moment! ✨

Pearson, Richard. 'On the preference which should be given in the Practice of Medicine to the Employment of the Seeds of Plants, when they (the seeds) possess properties equivalent to those possessed by other parts of the same Plant', in The Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 42, No. 120, Edinburgh: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green & Longman (1834)

(the seeds)

[glossahortensia]

DEAD MEN'S FOOD

LETTUCE Lactuca sativa L. (1753). Period English: lettuce. Period French: laitue f. Period German: Laktuk; Lattich m.; Salat m. L. sativa: Garten-Salat m. (’garden lettuce’). Sentiments: Refroidissement (‘Cooling, chilling’) Cold-hearted Let us forget Coldness

Ah, Lettuce.

Truly, what can one say? There it is, the humble lettuce. The bread of the salad. The leaf of the ground. The only reason I can pretend a fast food chicken wrap is ‘healthy’. The favourite sport of chewing pests in my garden. Not my favourite of the leafs (that would be tea, followed by spinach, I think). But certainly: a leaf.

When we speak of floriography in the modern day, there is a tendency to sell it as a ‘secret code’ delivered through careful sending of bouquets, and for that matter conducted all in flowers. People should generally be forgiven for thinking this - after all, it’s in the name, and many of these handbooks contain instructions for the hand delivery of flowers and how this affects their meaning - but it is largely untrue. I’m happy to be proven wrong about this, but I have yet to come across any work of fiction or documentary writing from the period depicting the practice, as the most condemning evidence. Another reason to think this is untrue is purely that these handbooks vary so wildly, and intentions could easily become confused. Perhaps one could send a bouquet with a book to be referenced by the receiver, but books were not cheap and that seems to be an outside possibility. And the last reason is, quite simply, that it’s not all flowers within.

There are those entries that are just unlikely or unpleasant inclusions for a bouquet - many will make mention of various fungi, toadstools, champignons, truffles and the like, and even the stinking land algae Nostoc, also known as ‘witch’s butter’ and infamous for growing in high-nitrogen environments such as graveyards (although in other traditions, such as in China, it is recognised for its nutritious culinary potential). Then we have entries that would cause harm to one receiving them, such as stinging nettles and poison ivy. Other entries are indeed flowers but would be impossible to integrate into a cut flower industry: wild arums (including those which smell like horse carcasses!), night blooming cacti, spring crocuses, belle de nuit, all flowers that fade after a single day, and sometimes do not even survive that. Last, there are entries that would be physically impossible to include in a bouquet, including giant flowers like Agave americana, with flower spikes up to 8 metres in height, and broad entries like ‘rose bush on a lawn’, all of which make it clear that the intent of floriography is more symbolic - to be integrated into poems, illustrations, decorations - than it is a literal guide to bouquet sending.

The lettuce strikes me as one of these entries. For one thing, it isn’t about lettuce flowers, which are quite lovely on their own, as lazy gardeners who have been given the mercy of the slugs will know.

It is hard to imagine receiving a bouquet with leaves of lettuce in it, but perhaps not harder than what that would signify: cold-heartedness. ‘To hell with you, have a limp shred of lettuce.’ Brutal. But all this is probably because lettuce as an emblem well predates the floriography handbooks of Glossa Hortensia.

Read about why the goddess of love and her slain paramour give this garden favourite a chilly reception in the language of flowers, this week on the Glossa Hortensia Substack and Patreon.

Dead Men's Food (Lettuce)

The goddess of love and her slain paramour give this garden favourite a chilly reception in the language of flowers.

[glossahortensia]

ALL THE DAUGHTERS OF THE SUN

BLACK POPLAR

Populus nigra L. (1753).

Period English: black poplar.

Period French: Formal: peuplier noir m. (‘black poplar’). Colloquial: biouté; bouillard m. (related to bouleau, 'birch'); bugle; bule; lear; liard m.; liardier m.; peuplier franc m. (‘French poplar’).

Period German: Pappelweide f. (‘pasture poplar’?).

Ancient Greek: αίγειρος f. (aigeiros; pl. αἰγείρων, aigeirōn) (Apollon. 4.604; Plb. 2.16.13; Strab. 5.1.9; c.200s BCE to c.100 CE).

Sentiments: Courage.

In the last few weeks, in terms of Glossa Hortensia, I have been lost in a world of poplars. The woods, if you will. The subject of this article, the black poplar, Populus nigra, is universally given the sentiment of ‘courage’ by French and English authors, stemming from ‘Charlotte de Latour’ (a pseudonym) in 1819, widely recognised as the ‘first’ specific floriography book. I hope to fill you in a little more about why precisely she says this is the case, as it’s a clear error as we will come to, but that will have to wait until I reach her book.

But that is the subject for another article. Let us instead find the black poplar in Classical myth, in a story of Ovid’s Metamorphoses ignored by our floriography authors, about women - courageous ones, but foolhardy - the Heliades, the daughters of the sun.

More today on my Substack.

All the Daughters of the Sun (Black Poplar)

The daughters of Helios transformed into black poplars in ancient myth.

[glossahortensia]

Cyclamen

Diffidence

Genus Cyclamen L. (1753)

Modestly hidden in the leaf-litter, the beautiful, bowing flowers of the wild cyclamen suggest diffidence to our authors.

There are several species of cyclamen wild in Europe, and introduced to Britain, but they appear to have largely escaped horticulture in the time. These days, it's C. coum (Eastern cyclamen or sow's-bread) and C. hederifolium (ivy-leaved cyclamen) that proliferate in the woodland, and I confess to be particularly fond of their little, fairy-like flowers. I have grown the latter and found them so strange and charming, with their pig-tail spiral tendrils and tiny pink flowers. They grow well under established deciduous trees, are frost-hardy, and easy to propagate. I recommend them.

These wild cyclamen are far-flung from the cyclamen of contemporary horticulture, however - I was lucky to get one in a wild form from a rare plant nursery in the Macedon Ranges. The cyclamen of nurseries are Cyclamen persicum, florist's cyclamen, a frost-tender plant with much larger flowers. Wikipedia mentions its cultivation in England dates to the 1860s, although it has a longer history in France. I note this for our historical writers with bouquets on their minds - that is, a cyclamen flower of the first half of the century in Britain would only be suitable for the smallest nosegay, not a full bouquet.

Read more here on Glossa Hortensia:

Image source: Prof. Dr. Thomé's Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz, Otto Wilhelm Thomé and W. Migula, Gera-Untermhaus: Eugen Köhler (1889) via the Biodiversity Heritage Library.