Language of Flowers: Victorian Floriography Zine

July 28, 2025

I became interested in floriography after reading The Grace Year by Kim Liggett. In the novel, women live in an oppressive society, and one means of subversive communication is the use of symbolic flowers. As the novel progressed, the flower symbolism became more important to the plot. This made me wonder if it was completely within the world of The Grace Year or if the flower language existed outside the novel.

I then began a deep dive into the Victorian world of floriography. Cornell University has a digital collection of 90+ rare books on the subject. This lost art was mostly used for romantic purposes to connect with a lover in a time when emotions and self-expression were restricted. However, as I became familiar with the ~600 different flowers with known meanings, it became clear to me that this can be used for so many other purposes, such as communication with friends, enemies, and even for resistance.

Definitions for flowers can vary, and the source material for this zine was taken from The Language of Flowers: an alphabet of floral emblems (1876), published by T. Nelson and sons, Paternoster Row. From there, it became a fun data processing project to convert the images of the pages to text and reformat the definitions into this zine. The illustrations are mine.

If you want to explore the raw data, here is the view-only link. I tried to correct typos as I went, but it’s not error-free.