The Language of Flowers

Product Information

When Elizabeth tries to reconcile with both Victoria and Catherine, her nephew Grant asks her to stop, outlining his mother’s decline into a dementia-like illness. To be honest, I was worried this might end up being one of the many over-hyped books I’ve been reading lately.

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.It is about a lonely thirty-something florist and a celebrity photographer, who dreams of shooting Canadian landscapes, living wall-to-wall in an apartment building without meeting each other. The Victorian language of flowers was used to convey romantic expressions: honeysuckle for devotion, asters for patience, and red roses for love.

The last thread between Victoria and me was torn when she declines everyone's help during her pregnancy and especially after the birth of her daughter, but selfishly makes the persons around her maintain, support, sacrifice, worry, plan and work for her even more than if she had accepted being advised and assisted right in the beginning. They may be prickly but also may produce the most beautiful lives, just as some thorny plants produce soft and beautiful flowers.She starts her own florist business, Message, and hires a girl from a group home to help pick up flowers. Sarah Josepha Hale, longtime editor of the Ladies' Magazine and co-editor of Godey's Lady's Book, edited Flora's Interpreter in 1832; it continued in print through the 1860s. So it took a sadder direction than I expected, but I was almost glad to see love not conquering all, at least not traditionally, and not on the first try. This felt like the perfect way to show both sides of her character, long before it would have been possible for me to describe her displaying affection or kindness toward another human being.