Purity, the Divine, and the Flowers of Nations

Across its range jasmine holds meanings that balance the sensual with the pure: its white flowers stand for purity, grace and the divine, and jasmine is used in temple offering and in bridal adornment throughout South and Southeast Asia. The sambac jasmine is a national flower of Indonesia and of the Philippines, where it figures in devotion and in ceremony, and jasmine is woven into religious and social ritual from Persia to the Pacific. Sacred and sensual at once, the flower carries a symbolism of love, purity, devotion and the fragrant night, all drawn from the plain fact of a small white bloom that pours out its scent after dark.

The flower lent its name to recent political history: the Jasmine Revolution is the common name for the Tunisian uprising of December 2010 to January 2011, which toppled the country's long-ruling president and helped trigger the wider wave of protest across the Arab world known as the Arab Spring, a modern political usage that draws on jasmine's older association, noted above, with the country and the region rather than on any religious or ceremonial meaning. Hawaii gives sambac jasmine its own local name and story: pikake, brought to the islands in the 1880s, was named by Princess Kaiulani after the peacocks, pikake in Hawaiian, that wandered the jasmine-planted grounds of her estate, Ainahau, a nineteenth-century royal naming distinct from the flower's older Asian religious meanings.