Flower Day

The idea that flowers could speak reached Europe through Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who described Turkish flower-message customs after living at the Ottoman court in Constantinople around 1717. Her letters seeded a fascination that would bloom a century later.

The first real reference book came in 1819, when Louise Cortambert, writing as Madame Charlotte de la Tour, published Le langage des Fleurs, the first dictionary of floriography. An earlier 1809 list by Joseph Hammer-Purgstall had catalogued meanings, but Cortambert's book set the template. By mid-century the genre had become a fixture of Victorian bookshelves, and Victorians traded small bouquets called nosegays or tussie-mussies as wearable notes.

The flowers most people actually buy travel a long way to reach them. More than half of all cut flowers sold worldwide pass through one Dutch town, Aalsmeer, home to the Royal FloraHolland auction, the largest place flowers are traded anywhere. Much of that stock is grown near the equator and flown in overnight from Kenya, Ethiopia, Ecuador, and Colombia.