What flowers represent love?

Find a florist if you are looking to express love, appreciation, joy or sorrow with flower gifts. Roses, especially red roses, are the penultimate flower representing passionate love. White roses speak to eternal love, pink for perfect happiness and thornless roses mean love at first site.

However, did you know that in Victorian times people used flowers to send a variety of messages, all encoded in the floral bouquet? Using flowers to express hidden meanings derived from history and its symbols, mythology, folklore and religion is called floriography, or in Victorian times, "the Language of the Flowers".

Victorians were not encouraged to express feelings openly for one another, so resorted romantically to using flowers to send secret and subtle messages represented by different blooms. Not only were fresh flowers used, but also different flowers were incorporated into jewelry given to lovers and friends, each brimming with its own hidden epithet.

There are as many ways to express love as there are flowers in the field. Although red roses are the traditional flower for passionate love, buttercups and primrose express the childish, most innocent first love. Forget-me-knots were given to express love and remembrance and were offered by a soldier to his love as he left for battle or engraved on a special gold locket holding his photo. Honeysuckle represents the binding embrace of a lover. Hyacinths speak of sincerity. Moss was included in flower gifts to express maternal love and the softness and care of mother. Adding one of the many mosses to Mother's Day flowers is a lovely sentiment. Anemones are the sympathy flower representing dying love. In mythology the anemone arose from the tears of Aphrodite as she mourned for the death of Adonis, her lover.

Expressing yourself to you lover can be as easy and unique as the fresh flowers you send in flower gifts for anniversaries, birthdays or just any day at all.