The Language of Flowers

The language of flowers is as old as language itself. In the earliest poetry familiar plants were used to represent simple emotions, ideas, or states of mind: love, hope, despair, fidelity, solitude, beauty, mortality. Over time these associations entwined with myth and legend, with religious symbolism, folk and herbal lore. By the early 19th century the ''Language of Flora'' had become increasingly refined, especially in England and America, where sentimental flower books listing flower meanings and illustrating them with verse were perennial bestsellers.

The Everyman Language of Flowers without sacrificing the charm of its Victorian predecessors aims to provide extended, updated and rather more robust floral anthology for the 21st century, presenting poetry from ancient Greece to contemporary Britain and America, and spanning the world from Cuba to Korea, Russia to Zimbabwe.

Here are Rumi and Rilke on the rose; Herrick and Louise Gl¿ck on the lily; Chaucer