Language of Flowers

Kate Greenaway's Language of Flowers is a primary Victorian-era reference volume cataloging the sentimental meanings popularly assigned to flowers in nineteenth century England, illustrated by Greenaway herself. As a period artifact it is a genuine and often-cited record of how floriography was practiced and marketed to a Victorian readership, useful for dating and sourcing specific flower-meaning pairings back to their own era rather than to a later or invented tradition. It is not a scholarly history of floriography's origins or a comparative study across cultures, and the meanings it lists are Greenaway's own compilation from the genre's already-established Victorian conventions rather than an independently verified folk tradition, so it documents one popular codification rather than settling any single flower's meaning as authoritative.