Expressions // Floriography + Harry Potter
‘Be like the lily graceful; delicate
As the long-lived Petunia, so meek’
// The Poetry of Observation part Second and other Poems by William Asbury
I was originally inspired to write about this subject after reading a piece on the Pottermore website (now Wizarding World) entitled, “Lily, Petunia and the language of flowers.” I found it such a fascinating new way of looking at Lily and Petunia but also, as I discovered in that piece, the subtext of Snape’s humiliating interrogation of Harry in his first potions lesson. Being a firm believer in the fact that very little JK Rowling writes is merely a happy accident, as well as something of a research addict and compulsive over-analyser, I wasn’t quite content to walk away from the subject having only skimmed the surface, so I decided to go a little bit further in order to examine the sources from which we might derive the meanings attached to that now iconic exchange.
The 1800s saw a proliferation of ‘floriography’ books in the UK and the US; hundreds of these floral dictionaries were published with the aim of guiding prospective bouquet senders toward the most suitable blooms for their intended recipients. These books took on a number of forms. Some were anthologies of floral-themed poetry with accompanying glossaries, others were more concerned with the history of the flower, its introduction to Europe, or its place in ancient Greek mythology, and others, still, were simply dictionaries, alphabetical lists of flowers with concise, often simply one-word definitions: basil – hatred, cabbage – profit, coves – dignity, etc.
Given the number of different books published, then, I wasn’t exactly surprised to find that a quick scan through six or seven of these volumes betrayed a slight lack of consistency where certain flowers were concerned. But, where a broad consensus cannot be reached, I’d like to think we’re afforded even greater scope to contrast and even connect these definitions in the context of Rowling’s series. Flowers are, after all, ‘the representatives of all times and of all nations; the pledges of all feelings.’[1]
