Say it with flowers: A new book revives the Victorian trend for bestowing meanings on our blooms

[xchrom]

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/say-it-with-flowers-a-new-book-revives-the-victorian-trend-for-bestowing-meanings-on-our-blooms-2336164.html

We give them at birthdays, send them to funerals and wear them at weddings – but how much do we ever think about our floral choices, beyond the obvious aesthetics or fragrance? According to a new novel, whose central character revives the Victorian trend for bestowing meanings on to our blooms – there's more to our pansies, peonies and petunias than meets the eye – or, indeed, the nose.

The Language of Flowers by the American author Vanessa Diffenbaugh, is poised to do for the floral bouquet what Joanne Harris's 1999 book, Chocolat, did for cocoa when it is published next week. Fought over by nine publishers and about to go on sale in 31 countries, the story centres around a damaged heroine, Victoria, who becomes absorbed by the 19th-century art of communicating through flowers and plants to soothe the pain of her fractured childhood.

Where did Diffenbaugh get the inspiration for this archaic motif? "I very much grew up around flowers and gardens," she says. "Both my mother and stepmother were fantastic gardeners, though with very different styles."

But it was when she was 16 and discovered a copy of Kate Greenaway's illustrated dictionary, Language of Flowers, in a secondhand bookstore that her interest really developed. "I became fairly obsessed with it," she says. And she put her obsession into practice, "writing" a poem for her high school boyfriend via the medium of carefully chosen blooms attached to a piece of twine and connected with words on pieces of paper.