Tip of the Week: The Language of Flowers
Posted in Emily Dickinson, Exhibitions, Gardening Tips on May 3 2010, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. Join her each weekend for home gardening demonstrations on a variety of topics in the Home Gardening Center. |
This spring The New York Botanical Garden is paying tribute to the American poet Emily Dickinson in the exhibition, Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers. Emily Dickinson was an avid gardener and an amateur botanist. She carefully pressed and dried wildflowers and slipped them between the pages of her letters and her poems. She presented flowers with a few lines of verse as a welcoming gift to the occasional visitor.
As poets did in earlier times, Emily Dickinson referred to the symbolic meaning of flowers in her poems. She saw the violet as a sign of humility, the native arbutus as an emblem of candor, and the poppy as a projection of doom.
The language of flowers, which assigns symbolic meanings to flowers and plants, was a craze in 19th-century America. Floral dictionaries flooded the market, ranging from simple indexes to elaborate texts with colorful images.