Why waste time say lot word when one flower do trick?”

–Kevin Malone, Dunder Mifflin Paper Company

Floriography, or the language of flowers, goes a lot further than the association of “love” with a red rose. Flower arrangements have long been used to express specific emotions and even coded messages. Victorians even carried around “floral dictionaries” and had entire conversations using talking bouquets called “tussie-mussies”.

As with everything else, my dude- Constantinople find a way to insert himself in this tale too. It was his obsession with tulips and botany that thrust the usage of flowers for covert communication in to the limelight. Soon enough, the trend found its way from Constantinople’s Ottoman court to Europe, and ultimately to the United States of America too. Flowers were now not only a part of the CIA’s toolkit, but also an inalienable part of classical literature and art. Symbolic usage of flowers can be seen all throughout literary masterpieces like Hamlet and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s stone as well as in artistic sensations like the Lily Crucifix, wherein Jesus Christ is seen crucified on and holding a lily.

The plot thickens further as I visit http://thelanguageofflowers.com/ . The people who curate the website did not fluff around when it came to naming it and neither did they do so with the interface. The clean and colourful font specifies an emotion associated with the flower but once you get past the ads, you notice that a flower might be associated with multiple emotions. A carnation may signify undying love as well as, funnily enough, “No, I can’t be with you”. With such varied meanings, a talking bouquet could have led to wars, or worse yet, a lovers’ quarrel.

As of today, I am still nowhere closer to understanding the inner workings of the secret world of floral communications. It does not help either when searches for “spy flower espionage” returned nothing but pages after pages of results for “Spy Hidden Flowerpot Cameras”. Some day, I hope I can carefully craft a bouquet that says “I love the crisp taste of water as it guzzles down my parched throat yum yum H20 hydrohomies rule” until then please accept this virtual cyclamen.

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