From the Soil Up — Understanding Why Plants Speak to the Heart
There is a particular quality of light on a May morning that belongs entirely to itself. It arrives at an angle that suits neither the stark brightness of midsummer nor the thin, tentative gleam of early spring, but something richer and more considered — a light that seems almost to have been designed for the purpose of illuminating a garden in full, generous, complicated bloom. It is the light of Mother’s Day. And if you have ever stood in a garden at that moment, arms full of something cut from the border, breathing in a scent that seems to carry within it every warm kitchen you have ever known, you will understand why flowers and mothers have been inseparable companions throughout recorded human history.
This guide is an invitation to look more deeply at that relationship. Not merely to catalogue which flower means what — though we shall do a great deal of that, and with relish — but to understand the layered, living grammar of plant symbolism: where it came from, how it grew, why it still moves us, and how the committed gardener can use it to speak a language of extraordinary nuance and beauty. Because a garden designed with symbolic intention is not merely decorative. It is communicative. It is, at its very best, a love letter written in petals and leaf and soil.
Symbolism in horticulture is ancient. It is older than the formal language of flowers — the Victorian florography that assigned meanings to blooms with almost bureaucratic precision — and older still than the classical poets who compared their beloved’s cheeks to roses. Human beings appear to have always looked at plants and seen more than botany. They saw character. They saw emotion. They saw the faces of the people they loved. The Greeks consecrated particular flowers to their goddesses. Medieval monks planted gardens whose every species carried theological significance. Renaissance painters loaded their floral arrangements with iconographic meaning that contemporary viewers would have read as fluently as a text. And by the nineteenth century, lovers across Europe and America were communicating entire declarations, negotiations, and heartbreaks through the careful selection and arrangement of flowers sent across parlour tables and drawing-room mantels.
We are the inheritors of all of this. When we choose a bunch of pink carnations to bring to our mother on the second Sunday of May, we are participating in a tradition of symbolic communication that stretches back millennia. We may not know precisely why the gesture feels right — why it feels more right than, say, bringing a pot of ferns, or a cutting from the apple tree — but we feel it nonetheless. This guide aims to make the unconscious conscious, to give names and histories to the feelings that flowers so reliably provoke.
We shall move through the garden methodically but not mechanically. We shall begin with the flowers most commonly associated with Mother’s Day itself — carnations, primroses, forget-me-nots, violets — and then broaden our perspective to consider the wider language of spring and early summer flowering. We shall visit the roses, that most eloquent of all garden families, and spend considerable time understanding the particular symbolism of colour, because this is a dimension that the casual flower-giver consistently underestimates. We shall look at herbs and their meanings, at trees and their long, patient symbolism, at the significance of fragrance and form and growth habit.
Throughout, we shall think practically about how these symbolic traditions can be put to use in the garden — not in the sense of creating a rigid allegorical scheme, but in the sense of making planting choices that carry emotional weight, that mean something, that speak to the specific relationship between a gardener and the mother, grandmother, or mother-figure in their life. Because the most powerful symbolic gesture is not the most learned one. It is the most personal.
Let us begin where all good gardening begins: in the soil of history.
Part One: The Deep Roots — A History of Floral Symbolism and Its Connection to Motherhood
Ancient Beginnings: Flowers, Goddesses, and the First Mothers
The association between flowers and maternal figures is so ancient that it pre-dates literacy itself. Archaeological evidence from burial sites across the ancient world suggests that flowers were among the earliest ritual offerings made by human communities — placed with the dead, offered at shrines, woven into crowns for religious ceremonies. And in the majority of ancient cultures where we have sufficient evidence to make the determination, the deities associated with flowers, gardens, and growing things were female.
In ancient Egypt, Isis — the great mother goddess, the divine archetype of maternal love and grief — was represented with flowers, particularly the blue lotus, which the Egyptians associated with creation, regeneration, and the life-giving properties of the Nile. The blue lotus (Nymphaea caerulea) was not merely decorative in Egyptian religious life; it was a profound symbol of the cycle by which death gives way to new life, a cycle that was itself understood to be essentially maternal in nature. Isis was the mother of Horus, and by extension the symbolic mother of every pharaoh, and the flowers that surrounded her in sacred art were not incidental ornament but precise theological statement.
The Greeks understood flowers with similar seriousness. Demeter, goddess of the harvest and one of the most important maternal figures in the Greek pantheon, was closely associated with poppies and wheat — plants whose symbolism extended far beyond agriculture into deep structures of grief, sleep, death, and renewal. The myth of Demeter and Persephone — in which the goddess’s grief over her daughter’s abduction literally causes the earth to become barren, and her joy at Persephone’s partial return causes it to bloom again — is among the most sophisticated flower-symbolism myths in the Western tradition. Every spring, the ancient Greeks understood, was the visible expression of a mother’s love and longing. Every flower was a testimony to the fact that Demeter had returned to tend the world again.
Aphrodite, the goddess of love, had her own flower allegiances, chief among them the rose — a plant whose connection to love, female beauty, and maternal tenderness would only deepen through the succeeding millennia. The Roman version of Aphrodite, Venus, was similarly rose-associated, and the Romans, those great disseminators of cultural tradition through conquest, spread the rose’s love-symbolism throughout their empire. By the time Christianity arrived in the Roman world, the rose had already accumulated centuries of romantic and maternal symbolism that would carry seamlessly into its new theological context.
Cybele, the great Phrygian mother goddess adopted enthusiastically by the Romans as Magna Mater, had her own floral associations — violets, in particular, were sacred to her, worn by her devotees in crown form during her spring festivals. The violet’s connection to maternal symbolism, which persists in both Victorian florography and contemporary tradition, has its roots here, in the worship of one of antiquity’s most powerful mother-figures.
What is striking about all of these ancient associations is how consistent they are across cultures that had little or no contact with one another. The connection between female power, maternal energy, and the flowering of the earth is not a European invention or a Mediterranean peculiarity. It appears independently across the globe, in forms that suggest something fundamental about human intuition: that the generative power of nature and the generative power of mothers are, at some deep level, the same thing.
In Japan, the chrysanthemum has been associated for centuries with the imperial family and, more broadly, with the kinds of enduring, disciplined beauty that Japanese culture has traditionally located in the feminine. In China, the peony — “the king of flowers” in Chinese horticulture — carries strong associations with female beauty, maternal warmth, and familial prosperity. In Mesoamerican cultures, particular flowers were associated with the goddesses of fertility and creation in ways that mirror, strikingly, the European traditions.
This universality is itself a form of evidence. When human beings around the world independently arrive at the same symbolic equation — flowering plant equals maternal power and love — we should take it seriously. We should understand it as something more than cultural accident. We should hear it, perhaps, as the articulation of a truth that transcends particular traditions: that the love of a mother, like the flowering of a plant, is among the most fundamental and beautiful facts of life on earth.
The Classical Tradition: Rome, the Church, and the Language of Sacred Flowers
The Romans brought their flower symbolism with them as they moved through the known world, and they found, as conquerors often do, that the peoples they conquered had their own rich traditions that proved remarkably compatible with their own. The synthesis of Roman, Greek, Celtic, Germanic, and Eastern floral symbolism that took place during the centuries of imperial expansion created an immensely rich symbolic vocabulary — one that the Christian church, as it spread through the former Roman world, would inherit and transform.
The church’s relationship with flowers is complex and often paradoxical. Early Christian theologians were suspicious of the pagan associations that clung to so many garden plants, and there were moments in Christian history when elaborate floral ornament was seen as dangerously worldly, dangerously connected to the old religions the church was working to displace. But the church also understood, with considerable sophistication, that symbolism is among the most powerful tools available to any religious tradition. And flowers, with their beauty, their brevity, their suggestion of paradise and transcendence, were too good to abandon.
The rose was the most dramatic case. Roses had been sacred to Venus, associated with the goddess of love and physical desire in ways that might have made them uncomfortable additions to Christian sacred spaces. But the church’s solution was characteristic: it didn’t abandon the rose, it re-dedicated it. The rose became the flower of the Virgin Mary — “the rose without thorns,” as she was sometimes called, a symbol of her miraculous conception, her purity, her maternal tenderness. The rosary itself — that central object of Marian devotion — takes its name from the Latin for “rose garden,” reflecting a tradition of constructing garlands of dried roses that were gradually replaced by beads of the same size.
This transformation of the rose from Venus’s flower to Mary’s is among the most significant moments in the history of floral symbolism, because it fused two kinds of love — erotic love and maternal love — into a single flower. The rose in Western symbolism carries both. It is simultaneously the flower of romantic passion and the flower of maternal devotion, and this dual identity explains much of its extraordinary power. When we give roses to our mothers, we are participating in a tradition of reverence that encompasses both the sacred and the passionate — that understands love itself as something that cannot be so easily categorised.
The lily, particularly the white Madonna lily (Lilium candidum), became another cornerstone of Marian symbolism. Its pure white flowers were associated with the Virgin’s purity and spiritual grace; its golden stamens suggested divine light; its fragrance was understood as a foretaste of heaven. In countless paintings of the Annunciation — that defining moment in Christian narrative when the angel Gabriel brings Mary the news that she will be the mother of God — the lily is present, often held by Gabriel himself, an emblem of the sacred femininity he comes to honour.
The violet, too, found a place in Marian tradition. Its humble, downward-facing flower was read as an expression of the Virgin’s modesty, her willingness to accept her extraordinary destiny without pride or ostentation. The violet grows close to the ground, in hedgerows and woodland edges, making no great claims for itself — and this quality of quiet virtue was powerfully associated with the ideal of Christian motherhood as expressed through Mary’s example.
What the medieval church created, in effect, was a complete symbolic language of maternal virtue expressed through flowers. Each plant had its theological meaning, which was simultaneously a statement about the nature of ideal motherhood. Purity, humility, compassion, endurance, fruitfulness, beauty that does not court attention — all were encoded in the garden, available for anyone who knew the language to read.
Mothering Sunday: The English Tradition and Its Floral Heart
Before the modern American Mother’s Day — a commercial and sentimental creation of the early twentieth century that subsequently spread around the globe — there was Mothering Sunday, the distinctively English tradition that falls on the fourth Sunday of Lent and whose origins are both ecclesiastical and social.
The ecclesiastical dimension is this: the fourth Sunday of Lent was the day on which Christians were expected to return to their “mother church” — the cathedral or main church of their region, as distinct from their local parish church — to make offerings and renew their religious commitments. This tradition of returning to the mother church was, by a natural linguistic and emotional extension, also associated with returning to one’s actual mother, and by the sixteenth century at the latest, Mothering Sunday had become an occasion on which domestic servants and apprentices — many of whom had left home in childhood for work in distant households — were given the day off to return to their family homes.
The flowers associated with Mothering Sunday have always been those of early spring: the flowers that were blooming in hedgerows and meadows on that fourth Sunday of Lent, which in England typically falls in late March or early April. Violets, primroses, daffodils, and wild anemones were the traditional flowers — gathered from the countryside on the walk home, carried in small posies to be presented to mothers and grandmothers. There is something deeply moving about this image: the young servant or apprentice, perhaps walking miles through early spring countryside, stopping to gather whatever was blooming in the verges, arriving home with a handful of small, bright, impermanent flowers that carried within them the whole weight of love and longing and the long months away.
The simnel cake that is also associated with Mothering Sunday carries its own floral symbolism in its traditional decoration of eleven marzipan balls (representing the apostles minus Judas), but it is the flowers that speak most directly to the heart of the occasion. And it is worth noting that these were not cultivated, florist’s flowers — not roses from a hothouse or carnations from a market stall. They were wild flowers, meadow flowers, the flowers of the English countryside in its earliest and most tentative spring expression. They were gathered with the hands, not purchased with money. And this distinction carries symbolic weight that we should not overlook: the gesture of gathering flowers with one’s own hands, of taking time in the natural world to select and collect and carry, is itself an expression of care and attention that no purchased bouquet can quite replicate.
It is worth spending a moment on the simnel cake’s floral connections, too, because medieval English baking had its own rich plant symbolism. The word “simnel” itself may derive from a Latin word for fine wheaten flour, and the cake was often flavoured with saffron — the extraordinary, labour-intensive spice produced from the stamens of Crocus sativus, itself a plant with deep symbolic associations with joy, spring, and divine light. Saffron’s connection to motherhood in English tradition is not as direct as that of the Mothering Sunday flowers, but its presence in the celebratory cake of the occasion is not entirely symbolic-coincidence either. The crocus, like the primrose and the violet, is among the first signs of life after the winter’s dormancy. All three carry within their symbolism the quality that is perhaps most fundamental to the maternal: the capacity to generate life from apparent barrenness, warmth from cold, hope from waiting.
Anna Jarvis and the American Mother’s Day: Carnations and Commerce
The story of how Mother’s Day became a global occasion — observed in some form in more than forty countries around the world — is largely the story of one American woman’s grief, determination, and subsequent heartbreak.
Anna Jarvis was born in 1864 in West Virginia, the daughter of Ann Reeves Jarvis, a community activist and Sunday school teacher who had, during the years following the Civil War, organised “Mothers’ Friendship Days” — events designed to bring together families from both sides of the conflict in a spirit of reconciliation and healing. Ann Reeves Jarvis died in 1905, and her daughter, devastated by the loss, determined to honour her memory by establishing an official national day of celebration for mothers.
The flower Anna Jarvis chose to represent her new occasion was the white carnation — specifically the white carnation, which had been her mother’s favourite flower. Anna Jarvis distributed white carnations at the first official Mother’s Day service, held on 10th May 1908 at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, and from the beginning she was specific about the symbolic meaning she attached to them: the white of the carnation represented purity, love, and the endurance of a mother’s memory. She wrote that “a carnation does not drop its petals, but hugs them to its heart as it dies, and so, too, mothers hug their children to their hearts, their mother love never dying.”
This image — the carnation holding its petals inward even in death, just as a mother holds her children close — is one of the most sustained pieces of flower symbolism in modern history. Anna Jarvis chose her flower not for conventional beauty, not for commercial availability, but for the specific quality of its dying. She read the carnation’s natural behaviour through the lens of maternal love, and in doing so she created a symbol of remarkable emotional power.
The distinction between white and coloured carnations is also Jarvis’s contribution to the symbolic language of the occasion. White carnations were for those whose mothers had died; coloured carnations — and pink or red carnations in particular — were for those whose mothers were living. This simple binary created a powerful ritual language for a public occasion: at church, at work, in the street, people could read in the colour of a carnation whether a person was in grief or in joy. It was a form of public emotional communication, instantly readable, extraordinarily intimate.
The subsequent commercialisation of Mother’s Day drove Anna Jarvis to despair. By the 1920s, florists, confectioners, and card manufacturers had so thoroughly colonised what she had intended as a day of personal devotion and quiet reflection that Jarvis found herself campaigning against the very occasion she had created. She reportedly disrupted a candy makers’ convention that was profiting from Mother’s Day, and she wrote letters of furious protest to anyone who she felt was treating the occasion as a commercial opportunity. She died in 1948 in a sanitarium, penniless, having spent most of her inheritance fighting the commercialisation she abhorred.
There is a deep irony in Jarvis’s story that flowers, specifically, illuminate. She had chosen the carnation as her symbol precisely because it was not primarily a florist’s flower — it was her mother’s flower, personal and particular, chosen for its meaning rather than its market value. The commercialisation she deplored turned it into exactly what she had hoped it would not be: a product, a commodity, something bought rather than felt. The lesson for the thoughtful gardener is clear: the symbolic power of a flower is not inherent in the flower itself. It arises from the relationship between the giver, the receiver, the specific moment of giving, and the particular meaning that has been invested in the choice. A carnation grown in your own garden, cut with your own hands, given with a specific meaning explained and intended — this is a very different thing from a cellophane-wrapped bunch purchased at a filling station. The flower is the same. The act is not.
Victorian Florography: The Height of the Language of Flowers
Between the symbolism of ancient mythology and the sentimental formalism of modern Mother’s Day lies one of the most elaborate and charming episodes in the history of floral symbolism: the Victorian language of flowers, known as florography.
Florography arrived in Britain largely via France, where a Turkish practice of communicating through flowers — the “selam” — had been described by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in letters written during her time as a diplomat’s wife in Constantinople in the early eighteenth century. The idea of a complete flower-language, in which specific blooms carried specific meanings that could be combined to send complex messages, captured the European imagination with remarkable speed. By the early nineteenth century, flower dictionaries were being published across Europe and America, each assigning meanings to hundreds of species with the confidence of a legislative body.
The problem — and also, in a sense, the charm — of Victorian florography was its lack of standardisation. Different flower dictionaries assigned different meanings to the same flowers, and an Englishwoman sending a message in flowers might have been using a language her correspondent was reading from an entirely different dictionary. The potential for misunderstanding was considerable. A suitor who sent yellow roses meaning “jealousy” in one florography text might have been horrified to discover that his beloved was consulting a volume in which yellow roses meant “friendship” or even “decrease of love.” The language of flowers was, as it turned out, a language with multiple competing grammars.
But for all its inconsistencies, Victorian florography created something genuinely valuable: a heightened cultural attention to the emotional resonances of specific plants. Even when individual meanings were contested, the general project — of treating flowers as a sophisticated emotional vocabulary — enriched the culture’s relationship with the garden in ways that persist to this day.
The flowers most consistently associated with maternal love and Mother’s Day in the Victorian tradition include carnations (sincerity, devoted love), primroses (young love, first love, the tenderness of beginnings), forget-me-nots (true love, remembrance), violets (faithfulness, modesty, love that does not seek attention), lily of the valley (return of happiness, purity, the sweetness of the domestic), and daisies (innocence, loyal love, beauty that is unassuming). Each of these is worth considering at length, because each carries dimensions of meaning that the standard Mother’s Day vocabulary has only partially explored.
Part Two: The Central Flowers — Their Symbolism, Their History, Their Garden Lives
The Carnation: Dianthus caryophyllus and Its Extraordinary Story
To understand the carnation’s symbolism, you must first understand the carnation itself — as a plant, as a presence in the garden, as a flower with a physical character unlike almost any other in cultivation. The genus Dianthus (from the Greek for “divine flower” or “flower of the gods”) contains more than three hundred species, from the tiny alpine pinks that stud limestone screes in miniature pink profusion to the great, ruffled, clove-scented exhibition carnations that Victorian florists coaxed to extraordinary size and complexity. The carnation that Anna Jarvis chose as the emblem of her Mother’s Day was the florist’s carnation, Dianthus caryophyllus in its cultivated forms — a flower bred for large, full blooms and long vase life, available in colours from purest white through cream, pink, coral, red, purple, and every imaginable combination.
The name “carnation” is itself etymologically interesting. It derives from the Latin “carnis” (flesh) — a reference, most likely, to the pale pink colour of the original wild form, which recalls the colour of human skin. This etymological root gives the flower a subtle connection to bodily love, to the love that is enacted through the flesh — through holding, nursing, tending, caring for a physical being. Maternal love, at its most fundamental, is an intensely physical relationship: the nursing infant, the held child, the mother’s hands applying medicine or smoothing hair or simply resting on a shoulder. The carnation’s name whispers this physical dimension of love.
The wild carnation, Dianthus caryophyllus, is a native of Mediterranean Europe — a plant of rocky outcrops, cliff faces, and dry, sunny situations that has been cultivated since at least Roman times. The Romans used carnations in garlands and chaplets for celebrations; the plant spread through Europe with Roman culture, and by the medieval period it was being cultivated in monastery gardens across the continent. Medieval herbalists valued it not only for its beauty and fragrance but for medicinal properties: carnation flowers were used in tonics believed to relieve fevers and to strengthen the heart. Whether or not these medicinal virtues were real, the association of the carnation with heart-strengthening speaks eloquently to its later role as a symbol of devoted love.
The scent of a carnation — particularly of the old-fashioned clove-scented varieties, which have a spicy, warm, almost edible fragrance quite different from the milder modern florist’s carnations — is one of the great trigger-scents of horticultural memory. Like the smell of cut grass or the first waft of sweet pea through an open window, the clove carnation’s scent is capable of producing involuntary memory of extraordinary vividness and emotional charge. For many people, it is specifically associated with grandmothers’ gardens — with the warm, sunny borders of older generations who valued the old border carnations for both their beauty and their wonderful smell. This intergenerational quality of the carnation’s scent adds another layer to its maternal symbolism: it does not merely smell of flowers; it smells of the past, of loving relationships across time, of all the grandmothers’ and mothers’ gardens that have ever existed.
In the garden, carnations and pinks (the border varieties of Dianthus) have particular requirements that themselves carry a kind of symbolic appropriateness. They demand excellent drainage — they will not tolerate wet feet, and a waterlogged soil will kill them quickly. They need sun — full, generous, uncomplicated sun, the kind that warms the soil and intensifies fragrance. They dislike rich feeding, which produces lush but weak growth that falls prey to fungal disease; they prefer a lean soil, moderate and unindulged, which produces the kind of compact, resilient growth that supports the flower without collapsing under it. They are, in other words, plants that respond well to restraint and tough love — plants that produce their best when not over-coddled, which is perhaps not an entirely accidental quality for the emblem of maternal love to possess.
The colour symbolism of carnations is, as Anna Jarvis established, particularly significant on Mother’s Day. But the broader colour language of carnations extends beyond the white/pink binary she employed:
White carnations speak of purity, sincerity, and remembrance — they are the carnations of memorial and of spiritual love, the flowers appropriate for grief as well as for the honouring of mothers who have passed.
Pink carnations, in their many shades from the palest blush to deep cerise, carry associations ranging from gratitude and admiration (pale pink) through affection and warmth (mid-pink) to a deeper, more passionate tenderness (deep pink). The pink carnation is the classic living-mother flower of the Jarvis tradition, and its wide range of shades allows for a degree of emotional nuance that white and red cannot achieve.
Red carnations carry the full force of passionate love — they are the carnations most associated with socialist movements (the red carnation was, from the late nineteenth century, the badge of labour movements across Europe), but they also speak of deep admiration and romantic devotion in the language of flowers.
Yellow carnations occupy a more complex symbolic position: in some traditions they represent disappointment or rejection, but more positively they speak of cheerfulness, warmth, and the particular kind of uncomplicated joy that a mother’s presence can bring.
Purple carnations, when they appear (usually as cultivated novelties rather than traditional forms), speak of capriciousness and unpredictability in Victorian florography — not obviously suitable for Mother’s Day, but perhaps honest about the occasionally surprising nature of even the most devoted maternal relationships.
Striped and bicoloured carnations carry the Victorian florography meaning of refusal, which has always seemed an unfortunate symbolic assignment for one of the most attractive carnation forms. Here, as elsewhere, we should remember that the Victorian language of flowers is one reference text among many, and that the meaning of a flower is always, finally, what the giver and receiver decide it to be.
For the gardener who wishes to grow carnations for Mother’s Day cutting, the key is to choose between the border carnations and pinks (Dianthus plumarius and related cultivars) for their outdoor performance and old-fashioned charm, and the perpetual-flowering carnations grown under glass for their larger blooms and year-round cutting availability. The border dianthus are hardier and more garden-worthy, thriving in the well-drained, alkaline conditions of a sunny border; they tend to be smaller-flowered than florist’s carnations but far more fragrant, and their informal, fringed petals have a natural grace that the more formal florist’s bloom sometimes lacks. For a gardener presenting flowers with personal meaning — grown in one’s own garden, cut with one’s own hands — the border carnation or pink is a far more powerful symbol than the hothouse carnation, however spectacular the latter may be.
The Primrose: Primula vulgaris and the Language of Beginnings
If the carnation is the Mother’s Day flower of America and the formal occasion, the primrose is the Mother’s Day flower of England and the hedgerow. No flower more perfectly expresses the specific quality of the English early spring — that tentative, hopeful emergence after months of grey and bare — than the pale yellow primrose, appearing in sheltered places before winter has truly conceded, its flowers the most exact possible yellow, the colour of warmth imagined rather than fully arrived.
Primula vulgaris — the common primrose — is not, in truth, all that common any more. Agricultural intensification, the loss of ancient hedgerows, and the nitrogen-enrichment of soils that have historically been nutrient-poor have reduced wild primrose populations significantly over the past century. Those who knew the English countryside fifty years ago and return to it now will notice the absence — the hedgerow banks that should be yellow with primroses in March and April, bare or colonised by coarser plants that have taken advantage of the changed conditions. This ecological loss has itself a kind of symbolic dimension: the primrose, the flower of beginnings and tenderness and first love, increasingly rare in the wild places that are themselves increasingly rare.
In cultivation, primroses are accommodating and grateful, willing to grow in the partial shade of deciduous trees that mimics their natural hedgerow habitat, pleased by a moisture-retentive soil that nevertheless does not become waterlogged in winter. They spread slowly by division and seed, forming generous clumps of pleated leaves from which the flowers emerge in such abundance, in a good year, as to almost obscure the foliage entirely. They are not demanding plants: they ask for reasonable light, reasonable moisture, and reasonable soil — the gardening equivalent of modest expectations and genuine contentment.
The Victorian language of flowers assigned the primrose the meaning of “young love” or “first love” — which might seem to make it an odd choice for a celebration of maternal love, which is rarely young and is certainly not the first kind of love one experiences. But if we think of “first love” in a slightly different register — not as the first romantic attachment, but as the first experience of being loved at all, the foundational love that precedes all others — then the primrose’s meaning becomes exactly appropriate. A mother’s love is, for most of us, the first love we ever know. It is the emotional template on which all subsequent love is modelled. The primrose, with its pale, clear yellow and its appearance at the very beginning of spring, speaks to this originating quality of maternal love.
There is also a less familiar Victorian meaning assigned to the primrose: “inconstancy.” This seems unjust to a flower of such steadfastness — primroses return year after year to the same spots, faithful to their particular patch of hedgerow or garden bank, never deserting for more glamorous situations. But the inconstancy reading may derive from the primrose’s brief season: it is here, brilliantly and abundantly, and then it is gone, leaving only the leaves as evidence of its presence. This brevity might be read as a reflection of childhood itself — that brief, extraordinarily vivid time of being a child, of being known as a child, of experiencing the world through the particular lens of a child’s relationship with its mother. Primroses bloom when the world is young and tender, and then the world, as it must, moves on.
In symbolic terms connected specifically to Mothering Sunday, the primrose carries the weight of the English countryside and the English spring. It is not a cultivated, sophisticated flower — it is a wild thing, or as close to a wild thing as the garden can produce. And this wildness is part of its meaning. A primrose says: I came from the real world, the natural world, the world that was here before gardens and that will be here after them. It says: this love I bring you is not the product of a shop or a hothouse — it grew in an actual place, in actual soil, under actual spring rain. It says, with the confidence of something that has survived every winter: spring always comes.
The colour of the primrose — that particular yellow, softer and more complex than daffodil yellow, with its overtones of cream and its heart that deepens to orange — is itself meaningful. Yellow, in the language of colour, is the colour of joy, warmth, and intellectual energy. But primrose yellow is not the assertive yellow of a sunflower or the dramatic yellow of a coreopsis: it is thoughtful yellow, reticent yellow, yellow that knows it is the colour of beginnings rather than of full expression. Primrose yellow says: here is the promise of warmth, the suggestion of summer, the first emergence of the light that will, in time, fully arrive.
For the gardener who wishes to use primroses as part of a Mother’s Day planting scheme, they are best used naturalised in grass — that most English of all garden effects — or planted in generous drifts beneath deciduous trees and shrubs. They combine beautifully with wood anemones (Anemone nemorosa), bluebells (Hyacinthoides non-scripta), and wild violets to create a spring understorey planting of considerable charm, entirely in keeping with the wildflower aesthetic that Mothering Sunday’s original flower-gathering tradition inspires. The polyanthus — the cultivated hybrid primroses available in a dazzling range of colours from nurseries each spring — lack the specific symbolism of the wild primrose, but they offer practical advantages for the gardener who wants reliable early-spring colour in a wider palette.
The Forget-Me-Not: Myosotis and the Symbolism of Memory
There is perhaps no name in the English language of flowers that is more immediately and resonantly symbolic than the forget-me-not. The name itself is the message. This small, bright-blue, golden-eyed flower — insignificant individually, extraordinary collectively, a mist of blue that seems in May to blur the boundary between ground and sky — carries within its common name the entirety of its emotional meaning. Remember me. Do not forget. This love will outlast presence.
The origin of the name is wrapped in legend. The most famous English version tells of a medieval knight who, picking flowers by a riverbank for his beloved, fell into the water and was swept away by the current. As he was carried downstream, still clutching the gathered flowers, he threw them to the bank with the cry of “Forget me not!” before drowning. It is a story in the grand tradition of tragic romance, and one that immediately establishes the flower’s connection to the grief of separation and the desire to be held in memory by those one loves.
In botanical terms, the forget-me-not is the genus Myosotis, from the Greek for “mouse ear” — a reference to the small, soft leaves rather than to anything more obviously romantic. There are about fifty species, most of them short-lived annuals or biennials, native to meadows, streamsides, and woodland edges throughout Europe, Asia, and the Southern Hemisphere. The one most commonly grown in British gardens is Myosotis sylvatica, the wood forget-me-not, a biennial that seeds itself with generous promiscuity through beds and borders, creating great drifts of soft blue that seem, at the peak of their flowering in April and May, to belong to a fairy tale.
The forget-me-not’s connection to motherhood and to Mother’s Day is somewhat indirect — it is not specifically a flower of maternal devotion in the way that the carnation or the primrose is. Its primary symbolic register is remembrance, which gives it a particular appropriateness for the honouring of mothers who have died. The white carnation serves this purpose in the Jarvis tradition; in the English tradition, the forget-me-not does similar work, saying: you are not forgotten. You are held in memory. The relationship we had continues to be real, though its form has changed.
But the forget-me-not also speaks to a dimension of living motherhood that is often overlooked in the sentimental register of Mother’s Day: the fear of being forgotten by one’s children. This is a fear that increases as children grow, as they leave home and establish their own lives, as the daily intimacy of their childhood gives way to the more occasional contact of adult family relationships. The forget-me-not, in this reading, is not the child’s message to the dead mother but the mother’s message to the departing child: remember me. Keep me in your mind as you go about your life in the wider world. Do not let the distance that is natural and necessary, the distance that is part of growing up, become a forgetting.
There is also a third dimension to the forget-me-not’s symbolism that is less often discussed but worth considering. The plant itself is a model of modest persistence. It is not a spectacular flower — no one gasps when they see a forget-me-not — but it seeds itself relentlessly, appearing year after year in the same beds and borders, impossible to entirely eradicate, returning with the reliability of a habit so deep it has become part of the structure of the garden. This quality of modest, unglamorous persistence is itself a form of love, and one that is characteristic of the maternal relationship at its most functional: the steady showing up, year after year, that is the ground note of most mothers’ devotion.
In garden design, forget-me-nots are among the most versatile of all spring flowers precisely because they ask so little. They will grow in full sun or partial shade, in moist or reasonably dry soil, in formal beds or wild gardens. They combine with tulips in the classic spring combination that has been a feature of English gardens for centuries — the tall, architectural tulip rising above the mist of blue, each enhancing the other’s qualities. They combine equally well with wallflowers (Erysimum cheiri), whose warm oranges and purples sit beautifully against the cool blue. And they naturalise perfectly under shrubs, in orchard grass, in the wider garden areas where a loose, wildflower aesthetic is appropriate.
For the gardener planning a Mother’s Day planting, a drift of forget-me-nots in that particular clear sky-blue, perhaps with the smaller-flowered Myosotis ‘Blue Ball’ for a compact, dense effect, says something that no purchased card can easily replicate: I have tended this. I have grown this from seed or from last year’s self-sown plants. I have watched it through the winter and I bring it to you now, in May, precisely because of what its name means.
The Violet: Viola odorata and the Virtue of Quietness
To encounter a wild sweet violet — Viola odorata — in a country hedgerow on a mild March morning is one of the finest experiences that early spring has to offer. The flowers are small, modestly coloured (typically a deep blue-violet, though white and pale pink forms occur naturally), and they face downward, as if unwilling to call attention to themselves. But lean close, and the fragrance that rises from those unassuming petals is extraordinary: rich, warm, sweet, and surprisingly complex, with a quality that chemists have spent considerable effort analysing. The key fragrance compound in violet flowers — ionone — has the unusual property of temporarily blocking the olfactory receptors responsible for detecting it, which means that the scent seems to come and go, appearing and disappearing in a way that feels almost supernatural, as if the flower is present and then absent, visible and then invisible.
This quality of the violet’s scent — its apparent modesty, its intermittent nature, the way it withdraws from direct attention only to appear again when not being sought — is a perfect metaphor for the kind of love the violet has traditionally symbolised. Viola odorata was associated in Victorian florography with faithfulness, modesty, and constancy — with the love that does not announce itself dramatically, that asks for no credit, that continues without need for acknowledgement. These are, it almost goes without saying, the precise virtues that have been most consistently attributed to maternal love throughout the cultural history of the West.
The association between violets and modesty has deep roots. Cybele’s devotees wore violet crowns; the flower was sacred to the great mother goddess precisely because its unassuming beauty seemed to express the quality of divine love that does not require worship but offers itself quietly and without condition. In Christian tradition, as noted above, the violet was associated with the Virgin Mary’s humility — the flower that faces downward, that grows close to the earth, that does not aspire to the heights, but whose scent is among the most ravishing in the natural world.
There is a poem by Horace (though the attribution has sometimes been disputed) that describes the violet’s modesty in terms that became canonical: the flower that shuns the open meadow, preferring the shade of hedgerows and woodland edges where it is unlikely to be noticed. This preference for obscurity was read, in later centuries, as a moral quality — the violet knows its own worth but does not seek to demonstrate it in the open field of public regard. It flowers where it chooses to flower, regardless of whether anyone is watching.
This resonance between the violet’s physical behaviour and the ideal of maternal love — the love that functions whether or not it is observed, that does not require an audience, that continues even when the recipient has grown and moved away and is not even thinking about it — is one of the most emotionally exact pieces of flower symbolism in the entire tradition.
In the garden, Viola odorata is a charming but occasionally unruly guest. It will seed itself abundantly, appearing in unexpected corners — at the base of roses, in the cracks of paving, at the feet of shrubs — in a way that seems to reflect its symbolic character precisely: turning up where it is not expected, making itself at home without invitation, contributing its fragrance to the garden’s atmosphere without demanding a formal planting position. The heart-shaped leaves, which persist through the winter as a low, dark-green groundcover, are among the most satisfying of all edging plants for a formal border. And a path edged with sweet violets, releasing their intermittent scent as visitors brush past them, is one of the garden’s most intimate and intimate pleasures.
The cultivated violet, ‘Viola odorata’ and its named varieties, is hardier and more garden-worthy than the wild plant in many situations. Varieties such as ‘Königin Charlotte’ (deep violet-blue, strongly scented), ‘Coeur d’Alsace’ (warm pink, fragrant), and ‘Sulphurea’ (a warm apricot, unusual and lovely) allow the gardener to extend the violet’s colour range while preserving its essential character. The Parma violets, double-flowered and intensely fragrant, were enormously popular in Victorian and Edwardian gardens and are currently experiencing a well-deserved revival among gardeners who have discovered their extraordinary scent.
For Mother’s Day specifically, a small pot of violet plants — perhaps a named variety with particular fragrance, planted in an old terracotta pot that will improve with age — is a gift of a different order from a bunch of cut flowers. It will live. It will flower for years. It will seed itself through the garden, so that its presence becomes a permanent feature of the landscape rather than a briefly beautiful event.
Part Three: The Rose — Queen of the Garden, Symbol of All Love
Rosa and Its Infinite Meanings
It would be possible to write an entire book about the symbolism of roses — and indeed, many people have. The rose is the most symbolically loaded plant in the Western horticultural tradition, carrying accumulated meanings from ancient mythology, Christian theology, Renaissance poetry, Romantic literature, Victorian florography, and contemporary commercial culture in a freight of significance that would be crushing if the flower were not so robust, so magnificent, and so absolutely itself underneath all the symbolism that has been piled upon it.
We do not have space here for a complete rose mythology, but we must spend significant time with this most important of garden flowers, because its relationship to maternal love is both ancient and nuanced, and because the gardener who understands rose symbolism has at their disposal one of the richest expressive vocabularies in all of horticulture.
The rose, we have noted, was sacred to both Aphrodite/Venus and to the Virgin Mary — a dual dedication that fuses erotic love and maternal love in a single flower. This fusion is theologically complex and emotionally profound. It says: the love of a mother and the love of a lover are not entirely different things; they are both forms of eros, in the Platonic sense — a love that reaches out to the other, that desires the other’s flourishing, that is willing to suffer for the other’s sake. The rose holds both forms of love simultaneously, and this is part of why it is so powerful: it does not specialise. It contains everything.
The colours of roses carry some of the most precisely developed colour-symbolism in the entire language of flowers:
Red roses: The absolute standard-bearer of passionate love in the Western tradition, red roses have been the language of romantic devotion since at least the Roman period. For Mother’s Day, red roses say: I love you with a love as serious and as deep as any love I am capable of. There is nothing conditional in this gift. It is the full expression of the warmest colour in the garden.
Pink roses: More nuanced than red, pink roses cover an extraordinary range of emotional registers depending on their shade. Pale pink says admiration, tenderness, grace — a love that is soft and grateful. Deep pink says appreciation and heartfelt gratitude. The salmon pinks and warm corals that occupy the middle ground between pink and orange speak of desire, enthusiasm, and joy. Pink is, in many ways, the most motherly colour of all roses — warm without burning, expressive without overpowering.
White roses: Purity, silence, reverence, new beginnings, and memory of the dead — white roses carry a solemn charge that makes them appropriate for memorial occasions but also for the expression of a love that has passed beyond the need for demonstration and exists in a realm of simple truth. White roses say: what I feel for you is real and it is quiet and it needs no ornament.
Yellow roses: A complex case, as noted with yellow carnations. In some traditions, yellow roses represent jealousy or the waning of love; in others, they represent friendship, joy, and warmth. The warm golden-yellows of varieties like ‘Graham Thomas’ or ‘Golden Celebration’ seem to speak more of generous happiness than of jealousy, and for Mother’s Day they carry the message: your love has always been like sunshine — bright, generous, sustaining.
Orange roses: These are the roses of enthusiasm, admiration, and passionate pride — the roses that say “I am so proud of you” or “you inspire me.” For a child honouring a mother who has accomplished something remarkable, or a mother celebrating a child’s achievement, orange roses speak with a particular directness.
Lavender and mauve roses: These roses, whose colours are difficult to produce and which carry an air of exclusivity and mystery, speak of enchantment and of love at first sight — or, in the context of maternal love, of the wonder that a parent feels on first beholding their child. A lavender rose for a mother says: I was enchanted by you from the beginning.
Striped and multicoloured roses: The parti-coloured roses, whose petals carry two or more colours in stripes, splashes, or gradations, carry in Victorian florography the meaning of gaiety and warmth. But in contemporary terms they speak simply of the complex, multifaceted nature of love itself — love that contains more than one feeling, that cannot be summarised in a single colour.
Old Roses and Their Particular Symbolism
Within the vast category of “roses,” the old garden roses — the Gallicas, Damasks, Albas, Centifolias, Mosses, and Bourbons that predate the development of the modern Hybrid Tea in the mid-nineteenth century — carry a symbolism distinct from that of their modern counterparts. These are the roses of history, of tradition, of the ancient and medieval gardens from which so much of Western floral symbolism emerged. They tend to flower once, in early summer, in a brief, glorious burst that feels both extravagant and heartbreakingly brief. They tend to have more petals, more complex fragrance, and a more informal flower shape than modern roses. And they tend to be more disease-resistant in good soils and situations, being adapted through centuries of cultivation to the conditions of European gardens rather than bred primarily for perfect flower form under ideal conditions.
The Gallica roses, which include the very ancient Apothecary’s Rose (Rosa gallica var. officinalis) — one of the oldest cultivated roses in the world, grown in monastery gardens since at least the medieval period — carry the weight of deep historical association. Rosa gallica officinalis was grown for its petals, which were used medicinally and in the making of rose water and rose oil; its fragrance is rich, warm, and complex in a way that modern roses rarely achieve. This is the rose of medieval love poetry, of the Roman de la Rose, of the tradition that connects roses to the highest and most spiritual forms of love.
The Damask roses, which include the incredibly ancient Rosa × damascena (thought to have been brought to Europe by crusaders returning from the Middle East), carry fragrance of a different order — the fragrance that the perfume industry most prizes, the source of attar of roses, the scent that has been extracted and used in perfumery for thousands of years. The Damascus association gives these roses an additional layer of meaning: they are roses of the Middle East, of the trading routes along which so many cultural traditions were exchanged, of the ancient world’s knowledge of pleasure and beauty.
For the gardener who wishes to plant roses in honour of a mother, the old roses offer something that the modern Hybrid Teas and Floribundas cannot: a connection to the deep history of rose cultivation, a sense that the flower being grown and presented is itself a living link to the centuries of human beings who have grown and presented roses before. An old Gallica or Damask rose in a garden is not merely a beautiful plant; it is a piece of horticultural history, a continuity, a living embodiment of the tradition it represents.
Climbing Roses and the Symbolism of Embrace
Climbing roses deserve special attention in the context of maternal symbolism, because their growth habit itself carries meaning. A climbing rose does not stand upright alone; it reaches out, extends itself, seeks something to hold and to be held by. It requires support — a wall, a pergola, a trellis — but it also offers support in return: the great canes of a well-established climber can hold tonnes of weight, and the structure it creates on a wall or arch is both beautiful and substantial.
This quality of mutual support and embrace is, I would suggest, one of the most accurate botanical metaphors for the maternal relationship. A mother supports the child; the child, in time, supports the mother. The relationship begins with the child’s complete dependency and gradually moves toward the mutual support of adult family love. A climbing rose on a pergola — its canes intertwined with the structure, its flowers arching overhead, its fragrance released into the air through which all who pass beneath must walk — speaks of this entwining, this shared structure, this love that has become so integrated with the fabric of a life that it is impossible to separate from it.
The great climbing roses of the English garden — Rosa ‘Albertine’, with its extraordinary salmon-pink flowers and fierce fragrance; Rosa ‘Madame Alfred Carrière’, cream-white, repeat-flowering, tolerant of shade; Rosa ‘Veilchenblau’, the nearest thing to a truly blue rose that the genus has yet produced, its purple-mauve flowers fading gracefully to grey — are among the most romantic plants available to the British gardener. Planted to mark a significant birthday or anniversary, they will grow for decades, covering walls and pergolas with increasing magnificence, outlasting their planters in some cases, becoming permanent features of gardens that may pass through many hands but will always carry the intention of the person who put the rose in the ground.
Part Four: The Wider Garden — Extending the Symbolic Vocabulary
Lilies: Majesty, Purity, and the Great Mother
If roses are the queens of the symbolic garden, lilies are their equals — equally ancient, equally powerful, equally loaded with accumulated human meaning. The genus Lilium is vast, containing more than a hundred species native to the temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere, and the lily’s symbolic history in Western culture reaches back to the very beginnings of civilisation.
In ancient Minoan Crete — that most sophisticated of Bronze Age Mediterranean cultures — the lily appears in palace frescoes in a context that suggests religious significance, probably associated with the great goddess that was the centre of Minoan worship. The connection between lilies and goddess-worship continued through Greek and Roman culture, where various species of lily were associated with Hera/Juno (queen of the gods and patron of marriage) and with Venus, in addition to the white lily’s later association with Mary.
The White Madonna Lily, Lilium candidum, is among the oldest cultivated plants in the world. Archaeological evidence suggests it has been in cultivation for at least three thousand years, and it was almost certainly being grown in Egyptian gardens before that. Its pure white flowers — opening in early summer from buds that emerge from the stiff, upright stem with almost architectural precision — and its extraordinarily rich, sweet fragrance have made it an emblem of sacred purity in cultures across the ancient world.
In Christian art, as noted above, the white lily’s association with the Virgin Mary became canonical. The painter’s shorthand for announcing Mary’s presence in a scene was to include white lilies — sometimes in a vase on a windowsill, sometimes held by the angel Gabriel, sometimes growing in the garden of the house where the Annunciation takes place. By the time of the Renaissance, this symbolic convention was so firmly established that any educated viewer would immediately understand a white lily’s presence as a Marian reference.
But the lily’s symbolism extends beyond purity and sacred womanhood. The Easter lily (Lilium longiflorum), a native of Japan that became the dominant Easter flower in American churches in the late nineteenth century, carries the symbolism of resurrection and new life — of the capacity to emerge, beautiful and vital, from apparent death. This quality of the lily — the way it grows from a bulb that, outside its proper season, appears completely dead, a dry, papery, uninspiring object — is itself a powerful symbol. What looks like nothing is, in fact, everything: the complete potential of a spectacular plant, folded into itself, waiting for the right conditions to reveal what it truly is.
For mothers, this dimension of lily symbolism carries a particular resonance. A mother’s potential — her knowledge, her patience, her capacity for love, her wisdom — is not always visible. Children, especially in adolescence and young adulthood, are often unable to see what is there; it is only later, with the perspective that comes from having established their own adult lives, that they may begin to appreciate the extraordinary thing their mother has always been carrying, like a lily bulb in winter ground.
The many garden lilies available to the contemporary gardener — from the species lilies that have been grown in English gardens since they were first introduced from Asia in the nineteenth century, to the modern Asiatic, Oriental, and LA hybrid cultivars that have extended the range of colour, fragrance, and flowering season enormously — offer an almost unlimited palette of symbolic possibility. The Oriental lilies in particular, flowering in high summer with flowers of extraordinary size, complexity, and fragrance, are among the most magnificent of all garden plants, capable of producing blooms that seem to exceed what a flower is technically entitled to be.
Peony: Abundance, Prosperity, and the Love That Does Not Stint
The peony occupies a singular position in the symbolic garden. In Chinese culture, it is the most important ornamental plant in the entire tradition — Paeonia lactiflora and its cultivated forms have been grown in Chinese gardens for more than two thousand years and are the subject of a passion that Western gardeners find almost bewildering in its intensity. Chinese peony collectors have named and documented thousands of varieties; entire mountains in China are given over to peony cultivation; the flower appears throughout Chinese art, porcelain, textiles, and architecture as an emblem of female beauty, prosperity, nobility, and good fortune.
In Western tradition, the peony’s symbolism is less precisely defined but equally positive. The plant takes its name from Paeon, the physician of the gods in Greek mythology — suggesting an association with healing and medicine that is supported by the genuine medicinal history of peony roots, which have been used across cultures for the treatment of various conditions. But in garden symbolism, the peony speaks primarily of abundance: the extraordinary fullness of its flowers, the way they pile petals upon petals in a profusion that seems almost excessive, the way the whole plant in full bloom achieves a level of exuberance that only just avoids the comic.
For Mother’s Day, the peony’s symbolism is almost shockingly apt. A mother’s love — at its best, in its most expressed form — does not stint. It does not offer a measured amount based on what seems appropriate or proportionate. It pours itself out in the way a peony pours out its petals: extravagantly, without calculation, filling whatever space is available with its warmth and fragrance and beauty. The peony’s famous fragrance — that sweet, slightly spicy, voluptuous scent that varies between varieties from a light freshness to something as rich and complex as the finest perfume — adds another dimension to its expression of maternal love: the scent that fills the room whether you are paying attention to it or not, that lingers after the source has left, that is carried in memory long after the actual encounter.
The timing of peony flowering — typically June in England, occasionally late May in warm years — makes them slightly late for Mothering Sunday, but they arrive reliably for the American and international Mother’s Day celebrations in May, and they are among the most magnificent cut flowers available at that time of year.
Tree peonies (Paeonia suffruticosa and its cultivars) flower earlier than the herbaceous forms — sometimes as early as April in sheltered positions — and offer an additional layer of symbolic richness. Unlike the herbaceous peony, which dies back to the ground each autumn and re-emerges each spring, the tree peony is genuinely woody, building a permanent framework of branches on which each year’s flowers are borne. This permanence, this accumulation of years within a visible structure, speaks to a different aspect of maternal love: not the annual renewal of the herbaceous peony’s fresh expression, but the gradually increasing complexity of a relationship that has been building, year by year, into something with real architectural substance.
Wisteria: The Long View and the Beauty of Patient Love
Few plants in the British garden make as dramatic a statement in May as a well-established wisteria in full bloom. The great curtains of lilac or white hanging flowers, their fragrance carrying on the breeze for considerable distances, the entire plant seeming to abandon itself to its flowering in a way that is both spectacular and surprisingly brief — wisteria in flower is one of the peak experiences of the British gardening year.
But the plant’s symbolism is as complex as its beauty. Wisteria is slow to establish — famously so. The old advice, “the first year it sleeps, the second year it creeps, the third year it leaps,” applies to wisteria with particular force. A newly planted wisteria may flower not at all for three or four or five years; it may require a decade to achieve the kind of established growth that permits truly spectacular flowering. This patience, this long-term commitment to a plant that will not reward you immediately, is itself a form of symbolic communication.
To plant a wisteria for a mother is to say: I am planting this for the long term. I am not thinking only of today but of the years ahead, the seasons we will share watching this plant establish itself, the decade from now when we will stand together beneath these extraordinary flowers. It is the gardener’s way of committing to the future, of expressing a love that looks forward as well as celebrating what already is.
Wisteria also carries, in Japanese and Chinese symbolism (both Wisteria sinensis and Wisteria floribunda being Asian natives), associations with long life, welcome visitors, and the beauty that comes from patient waiting. In Japan, wisteria viewing — hanami in the broader sense, specifically fujimi for wisteria — is a traditional practice analogous to cherry blossom viewing, a communal celebration of beauty at its peak. The Japanese admiration for wisteria is connected to the Zen appreciation of impermanence: this spectacular beauty will last only two or three weeks, and its very brevity is part of its power. Pay attention, the wisteria says, because this will not last. But also: wait, it says, because it will come back. It always comes back.
Lilac: The Flower of First Emotions
The lilac — Syringa vulgaris in its familiar garden form — is one of the most emotionally evocative of all spring-flowering shrubs, not because its flowers are technically the most spectacular in the garden, but because its fragrance is among the most powerfully nostalgic. The smell of lilac — that rich, sweet, almost overwhelming scent that carries for remarkable distances on a warm May evening — has a quality that triggers involuntary memory of unusual precision. Proust’s madeleine, in the horticultural world, might well be a sprig of lilac.
Victorian florography assigned lilac the meaning of “first emotions of love” — which returns us, as the primrose did, to the theme of beginnings. But unlike the primrose’s tentative, pale-yellow beginnings, the lilac’s first emotions are rich, generous, and slightly overwhelming — the first time you realise how deeply you feel about someone, the intensity of early love before experience has taught caution. For maternal love, this speaks to the moment of birth, of first encounter between parent and child, when the feeling that arises is so intense and so unprecedented that it seems to exceed whatever emotional vocabulary had previously been available.
The colour range of lilac is itself symbolically rich. The standard soft purple-lilac of the wild form speaks of the traditional Victorian associations: early love, youth, the heart before it has been complicated by experience. White lilac — varieties like Syringa vulgaris ‘Madame Lemoine’ or ‘Vestale,’ with their great panicles of double, pure white flowers — speaks of innocence and remembrance. The deeper purple forms, such as ‘Charles Joly’ or ‘Andenken an Ludwig Späth,’ carry a more complex emotional charge — something between passion and melancholy, the richness of love that has deepened through time. And the pink lilacs, such as ‘Katherine Havemeyer’ or ‘Mme Antoine Buchner,’ offer a warmth and tenderness that sits between the cool spirituality of white and the intensity of purple.
Apple Blossom: The Symbolism of Fruitfulness
The apple tree (Malus domestica and its wild ancestor Malus sylvestris) is one of the great symbolic trees of the temperate world. Across European cultures, the apple carries associations of knowledge, temptation, immortality, and plenty that reach back to pre-Christian mythology and forward to fairy tales and modern literary symbolism. And in spring, when the apple tree is in blossom — the whole tree clothed in clouds of white or pale pink flowers, each flower containing the beginning of a fruit that will not be visible for months — it is among the most beautiful sights in the British garden.
Apple blossom’s symbolism for Mother’s Day is located primarily in the concept of fruitfulness. A flowering apple tree is not merely pretty; it is actively promising. Each flower contains the potential of a fruit; each cluster of flowers represents the beginning of an abundance that will arrive, months later, in the harvest. This quality of present beauty containing future abundance is a powerful metaphor for maternal love: the mother’s love is not merely a feeling experienced in the present moment, but a generative force that will produce results over months and years and decades — children who grow into adults, relationships that deepen with time, the accumulated harvest of a lifetime of care.
In Celtic mythology, the apple tree was associated with the Otherworld and with immortality — the isle of Avalon (from the old Welsh word for apple) was the paradise to which heroes were taken after death, a land of perpetual harvest where apples grew without ceasing. This connection between apple trees and paradise gives the blossom a slightly otherworldly quality that complements its more straightforward symbolism of fruitfulness and beauty.
For the gardener who plants an apple tree in a mother’s garden — or in honour of a mother — this is among the most complete of all symbolic gestures. An apple tree is both beautiful and useful. It flowers in spring, fruits in autumn, provides structure throughout the year, offers shade in summer and an architectural skeleton against the winter sky. It will outlive its planter in most cases and may outlive their children’s children. It is, in the deepest sense, a gift to the future.
Part Five: Herbs and Their Maternal Symbolism
Rosemary: For Remembrance and for Love
“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember.” Ophelia’s distribution of flowers and herbs in the fourth act of Hamlet is one of the most famous flower-symbolism passages in the English literary tradition, and rosemary’s meaning — remembrance — is, here as so often with the most persistent pieces of floral symbolism, so deeply embedded in cultural tradition that it requires little explanation. Rosemary means: I remember.
Rosmarinus officinalis (now reclassified as Salvia rosmarinus, though the older name persists in common use) is a Mediterranean shrub of extraordinary character. Its small, intensely aromatic leaves — the source of an essential oil with applications in medicine, cookery, and perfumery — have made it one of the most valued of all herbs since ancient times. The Romans used rosemary at both weddings and funerals, recognising it as a plant appropriate to both the beginnings and endings of significant relationships. This dual appropriateness — for joy and for grief, for celebration and for remembrance — is precisely what makes rosemary so powerful a symbol in the context of maternal love.
A mother is the beginning. She is also, almost always, the first great grief — the first person we will lose who is genuinely irreplaceable. Rosemary at Mother’s Day says: I am celebrating this relationship in its fullness, which includes its beginning and all its years, but also, held quietly in the back of the mind, the awareness that it will one day end, and that when it does, the ending will be among the most significant of my life. Rosemary is honest, in a way that most Mother’s Day symbolism is not. It does not pretend that love is only joy; it acknowledges, without dwelling on, the grief that is love’s inevitable companion.
In the garden, rosemary is a plant of extraordinary generosity. It asks only for excellent drainage and full sun — the conditions it has evolved for on Mediterranean hillsides — and in return it provides evergreen structure through the winter, early flowers (sometimes beginning in February in mild areas) that are vital for the first pollinators of the year, and a fragrance that is among the garden’s most invigorating. There are varieties to suit every situation: the upright ‘Miss Jessopp’s Upright’ for formal hedging; the more relaxed, spreading ‘Tuscan Blue’ for informal borders; the prostrate ‘Prostratus’ for spilling over walls and raised beds; and the whiter-flowered ‘Albus’ for a slight variation in the standard blue-mauve colour scheme.
A rosemary plant given as a Mother’s Day gift — particularly a named variety chosen for its character, presented in a good pot with growing advice — is a gift that will last for years. In a sheltered position against a warm wall in all but the coldest British gardens, rosemary can achieve considerable size, becoming a substantial shrub of great beauty and utility. In some gardens, old rosemary plants twenty or thirty years old achieve a grandeur that fully earns the attention paid to them.
Lavender: Peace, Devotion, and the Fragrance of Healing
Lavender — Lavandula angustifolia and its many cultivars — is perhaps the most universally beloved fragrant plant in the British garden, and its associations with peace, healing, and calm devotion make it among the most appropriate of all herbs for the symbolic repertoire of Mother’s Day.
The name “lavender” derives from the Latin “lavare” (to wash), reflecting the plant’s ancient use in perfuming water for bathing and laundry. The Romans, typically, introduced lavender cultivation to Britain, and the plant has been a feature of British gardens — in physic gardens, cottage gardens, knot gardens, and border plantings — for at least seventeen centuries. Lavender’s medicinal history is long and distinguished: it has been used to treat headaches, nervous exhaustion, and anxiety across many cultures and periods, and contemporary research into lavender essential oil’s effects on the nervous system has provided some scientific support for its traditional reputation as a calming and restorative plant.
This quality of calm — lavender’s capacity to lower the pulse rate, ease anxiety, and induce a state of relaxed alertness — is itself symbolically appropriate for maternal love. The calmness of a mother’s presence, the way being with her can reduce the agitation of the world to manageable proportions, the particular peace of the family home at its best — these are experiences that lavender’s fragrance seems designed to evoke and honour.
In the Victorian language of flowers, lavender was assigned the meaning of “devotion” — a quiet, persistent, unwavering attachment that does not require dramatic expression. Like the violet, lavender speaks of love that functions steadily and without fanfare: the love that is there when needed, that makes itself available without announcement, that persists through the years without either dimming or making demands for recognition.
The colour of lavender — that particular soft blue-purple that is one of the most restful in the entire colour spectrum — carries its own symbolic charge. It is the colour of twilight, of the transition between day and night, of moments of gentle reflection. It is not a colour that asserts itself or demands attention; it is a colour that creates an atmosphere, that colours the air around it in a way that affects mood before it is consciously registered. A garden filled with lavender in July is not merely beautiful; it is transforming. It creates a specific emotional state — one of warm, fragrant, unhurried tranquility — that is itself a gift.
Thyme: The Courage and Activity of Love
Thyme (Thymus vulgaris and the many other species and cultivars of the genus) carries a symbolism often overlooked in discussions of Mother’s Day flowers and herbs, but one that deserves attention: in the language of flowers, thyme represents courage and activity. This might seem surprising for such a modest, ground-hugging little plant — but the association makes complete sense when you consider the plant’s character. Thyme grows in the most exposed, uncompromising of situations: rocky hillsides, cliff edges, windy headlands, thin soils where most plants would fail. It is adapted to conditions of hardship and does not merely survive them but flourishes, producing in difficult circumstances flowers of considerable beauty and fragrance that are absolutely irresistible to bees and other pollinators.
The courage of thyme — its capacity to produce beauty in adversity — speaks to a dimension of maternal love that sentimental Mother’s Day imagery sometimes fails to honour: the sheer effort and determination that goes into the daily work of mothering. Particularly for mothers who have raised children in difficult circumstances — under financial pressure, as single parents, through illness, through loss — the symbolism of thyme is precisely appropriate. This love is not merely warm and generous; it is tough and active and determined. It will produce flowers even on the cliff edge. It will be beautiful even in thin soil. It will keep going even when the wind is against it.
Mint: The Vigour of Affection
Mint (Mentha species) in the language of flowers represents virtue, but in the wider language of sensory experience it represents vigour, freshness, and the kind of affection that is actively engaged rather than passively felt. The explosive spread of mint — its refusal to be contained, its capacity to colonise new territory with enormous speed, its appearance in unexpected corners of the garden where it has made its way along underground runners — is itself a form of symbolic commentary on the nature of active love.
A mother’s love, at its most vigorous, is not passive or contained. It follows its children into unexpected places. It extends itself, sometimes to the gardener’s slight alarm, well beyond the original planting zone. It appears where it was not expected, in situations that might have seemed inhospitable, and it makes itself thoroughly at home. Mint’s exuberance — its determination to be present, to establish itself, to make its scent and flavour available to anyone who brushes against it — is a slightly comic but not inaccurate botanical metaphor for the maternal love that will not be contained or redirected.
The many varieties of mint — spearmint, peppermint, apple mint, chocolate mint, ginger mint, Moroccan mint — each with their different fragrances and flavours and characters — suggest the variety of forms that vigorous, active affection can take. No two mothers love in exactly the same way, just as no two varieties of mint are exactly alike. But all mints share the quality of freshness, of immediate sensory impact, of the aromatic presence that announces itself decisively.
Part Six: Trees and Their Long Symbolism
The Oak: Strength, Endurance, and the Maternal Deep-Root
The oak (Quercus robur, the English or pedunculate oak, and its relatives) is the archetypal tree of British culture — the tree of the greenwood, the tree of ships and hearts of oak, the tree associated with strength, endurance, and national character. In a specifically maternal context, the oak’s symbolism speaks to the foundational aspects of maternal love: the deep-rootedness, the sheer structural strength, the capacity to support an extraordinary weight of other life.
A mature English oak supports literally hundreds of species of insects, lichens, mosses, fungi, birds, and mammals — more than any other native British tree. Its contribution to biodiversity is extraordinary, and this quality of being a home for others, of being the structural support on which a whole community of living things depends, is a powerful botanical metaphor for the maternal role in family and community life. A mother, at her most fully expressed, is not merely the parent of her own children; she is the structural heart of a network of relationships and dependencies — a tree around whose presence a whole ecosystem has grown.
To plant an oak in a mother’s garden is the grandest possible garden gesture. It is the gift of centuries rather than years, the acknowledgement that what is being honoured has permanent value. But it is also, for most gardens, a practical impossibility: oak trees grow large, requiring space that the typical British garden simply does not have. The spirit of the oak can be honoured in smaller ways: through native wildflower plantings that support pollinators as the oak supports them; through the cultivation of other oak-supporting plants in the garden; or through the gifting of a young specimen to a larger, public space where it can fulfil its potential across the centuries.
The Hawthorn: The Wild and the Beloved
The hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) is among the most symbolically charged of all British native trees, carrying associations that range from the sacred to the protective to the romantic. It was traditionally planted at boundaries — at the edges of fields, around sacred sites, at the margins between the human world and the supernatural — and this liminal quality gives it a particular symbolic power.
The hawthorn’s spring flowering — the “May blossom” or “May” that gives the month of Mother’s Day its name — covers the hedgerow trees in clouds of white or pink flower that have the most extraordinary honey-sweet fragrance. May blossom has always been associated with celebration, with the return of warmth, with the joy of the world renewed. “Ne’er cast a clout till May is out” — the old advice to keep winter garments on until the hawthorn has flowered — identifies the hawthorn’s flowering as the true signal of spring’s completion, the moment when the cold has been definitively overcome.
For Mother’s Day, hawthorn blossom carries the symbolism of celebration and of the world at its most abundantly, generously hopeful. A spray of May blossom — gathered from a hedgerow or taken from a garden hawthorn — says: I bring you the world in its most beautiful and hopeful moment. I bring you the signal that winter is over, that warmth has returned, that the year is beginning its full expression.
It is worth noting, however, that hawthorn blossom carries in some British traditions the superstition that it should not be brought indoors — it is “unlucky” to cut May blossom, according to various folk traditions, and bringing it into the house is said to invite death. This superstition may have originated in the observation that the hawthorn’s distinctive fragrance — so appealing outdoors — includes a compound (trimethylamine) that is also produced by decaying flesh, giving the indoor scent of large quantities of may blossom an occasionally unsettling note. The practical lesson is to appreciate hawthorn blossom in the garden or hedgerow rather than in the vase — which is, in any case, where it is most perfectly expressed.
Part Seven: Colour, Fragrance, and Form — The Grammar of Floral Symbolism
The Language of Colour in the Mother’s Day Garden
We have touched on colour symbolism throughout this guide, but it deserves a section of its own, because the careful use of colour in the garden and in cut flower arrangements is one of the most powerful ways to communicate emotional nuance. Colour is the first thing we register — before form, before fragrance, certainly before conscious thought — and it operates directly on the emotional nervous system in ways that are both universal and culturally specific.
White: The colour of purity, simplicity, and truth in its most fundamental form. White flowers are also the colour of silence and of memory — appropriate for both the honouring of living mothers and the commemoration of those who have died. A white garden — the famous Sissinghurst White Garden, or any smaller-scale version of it — has a quality of peace and clarity that is unlike anything else in horticulture. White flowers seem to hold the light rather than absorbing it, and in evening they gather the fading sun in a way that prolongs the experience of garden beauty well into dusk.
Pink: The most complex colour in the garden. Pink is the colour of tenderness — of love that has gentled itself, that has taken the red of passion and softened it with the white of peace. It is the colour of warmth without intensity, of affection that does not demand, of care that is expressed without fanfare. The range from palest blush through all the salmons and roses and fuchsias to the deepest hot pinks covers an enormous emotional territory, and the thoughtful gardener who chooses their pinks with care can say a great deal through colour alone.
Yellow: Joy, warmth, and intellectual energy. The yellow flowers of spring — daffodils, primroses, forsythia, winter jasmine — carry the specific symbolism of emergence and hope, of the world asserting its intention to flourish again. In summer, yellow moves from the tentative hope of spring into the full confidence of warmth achieved: the golden yellows of rudbeckia and helenium speak of harvest satisfaction, of the year at its peak, of abundance without anxiety.
Purple and violet: These are the colours of royalty, of mystery, and of the spiritual in the Western tradition — colours that have always carried a suggestion of the transcendent, the elevated, the not-quite-of-this-world. In the garden, purple and violet flowers — lavender, alliums, salvias, wisteria, irises — add a quality of depth and richness that prevents a planting from feeling merely cheerful. They suggest that what is being experienced in this garden has layers, that its beauty contains complexity, that it merits not just pleasure but meditation.
Blue: The colour of distance and longing and the sky. True blue flowers are rare in the garden — blue is a colour that plants struggle to produce, and many of what are called “blue” flowers are in fact violet or lavender. But genuine blue flowers — gentians, the blue poppy (Meconopsis betonicifolia), certain delphiniums, the anchusa — have a quality that no other colour in the garden achieves: they seem to contain infinity in their petals, to hold within their colour the whole of the sky and the whole of the longing that the sky inspires. Blue flowers in the garden say: this love reaches further than I can express; it extends to the horizon and beyond it.
Red: Passion, energy, love at its most direct and unambiguous. Red flowers make no apologies and offer no qualifications; they state their position clearly and with considerable force. In the context of Mother’s Day, red flowers say: I love you more than I have ever found words for. They are not the colour of nuance or complexity; they are the colour of feeling at its most direct and least mediated.
Fragrance as Meaning
The symbolic language of flowers is not only visual. Fragrance is a dimension of horticultural symbolism that is at least as important as colour — and, in some respects, more emotionally powerful, because scent is the sense most directly connected to memory and emotion. The olfactory system has a physiological connection to the limbic system — the brain’s emotional and memory centre — that no other sense possesses, which is why scent can produce involuntary memories of extraordinary vividness.
In the context of the Mother’s Day garden, fragrance deserves to be designed as carefully as colour. A garden or bouquet chosen for its visual appearance alone misses more than half of what flowers are capable of communicating. The clove scent of carnations, the honey-and-vanilla of sweet peas, the rich complexity of roses, the cool freshness of lily of the valley, the warm Mediterranean notes of lavender and rosemary — all of these communicate something that no colour can, because they communicate directly to the emotional memory, bypassing the intellect entirely.
For the gardener planning a scented Mother’s Day planting, the most important consideration is the relationship between the recipient and fragrance. Does she love rich, heavy scents — the intensity of oriental lilies or Nicotiana sylvestris? Or does she prefer the lighter, fresher fragrances of sweet peas or lily of the valley? The most personally meaningful scented garden is one designed not around abstract symbolic principles but around the specific sensory preferences of the person it honours — a garden that smells, when she walks through it, of exactly what she loves most.
Form and Meaning: The Architecture of the Mother’s Day Garden
The form of a flower — its shape, its structure, the way it holds itself and carries its petals — is a dimension of symbolic meaning that Victorian florography largely ignored but that the observant gardener cannot overlook. The formal, upright, architectural flower (iris, tulip, delphinium) speaks differently from the informal, tumbling, generous flower (rose, peony, sweet pea). The simple, daisy-like flower with its frank, open face and its clear centre speaks differently from the complex, double, many-layered flower that requires close examination to fully appreciate.
The single flower, with its clear central boss visible and available to pollinators, is the form of complete openness — of love that has nothing to hide, that presents itself frankly and directly, that invites approach. The double flower, with its complexity of petal layered upon petal and its centre sometimes entirely obscured, is the form of depth and interiority — of love that contains depths not visible at a casual glance, that rewards patient attention and close observation.
For the Mother’s Day garden, a combination of both forms seems right: single flowers for the quality of open, direct affection; double flowers for the depths that affection contains. A bed of simple sweet briar roses combined with extravagant, double Bourbon roses; a border that moves from the frank faces of cosmos to the complex ruffles of heritage carnations; a vase arrangement that combines the spare elegance of a single tulip with the extravagance of a fully double peony.
The height of a flower carries meaning too. Tall flowers — the great spires of delphiniums and foxgloves, the reaching stems of alliums and gladioli — speak of aspiration and reaching upward, of love that seeks to elevate and inspire. Low flowers — ground-hugging thyme, spreading violets, the sprawling mats of aubretia — speak of groundedness and proximity, of love that stays close and makes its presence felt at the level of the earth rather than reaching for the sky. Both have their place in the symbolic garden, and both have their place in the emotional life of any maternal relationship.
Part Eight: Building the Mother’s Day Garden — A Practical Symbolic Planting Guide
The Principles of a Symbolically Intentional Garden
Having explored the rich vocabulary of plant symbolism available to the thoughtful gardener, we now turn to the practical question of how to use that vocabulary. A symbolic garden need not be — should not be — a rigid allegorical scheme in which each plant has been selected exclusively for its symbolic meaning and placed according to a predetermined plan. Gardens, like the relationships they honour, must live and breathe and change; they must accommodate the unexpected, the self-sown, the plant that does better than expected and the plant that fails. What we are aiming for is not a garden that means one thing completely but a garden that means something — that carries within its planting choices a general intention, an overall emotional character, that speaks in a consistent and considered language even as its individual elements speak in their own particular voices.
A garden intended to honour a mother — whether planted for her, or by her, or in her memory — might be organised around a few guiding principles:
First, the principle of seasonality: a garden that has something beautiful and meaningful to offer in every month of the year, from the snowdrops and hellebores of late winter through the summer’s rose and lavender peak to the autumn’s late roses and sedums and the winter’s berry-rich shrubs and fragrant witch hazels. Maternal love is not seasonal; neither should the garden that honours it be.
Second, the principle of fragrance: a garden that offers scent as well as sight, because the memory-triggering power of fragrance is among the most moving of all the garden’s gifts. At least one heavily fragrant plant for each major season — winter honeysuckle or Sarcoccocca in winter; sweet violets and hyacinths in early spring; roses and sweet peas in early summer; lavender and sweet Williams in midsummer; late roses and verbena in autumn.
Third, the principle of depth: a garden that rewards closer acquaintance, that reveals detail on examination that is not obvious from a distance. Double flowers, intricate markings, unexpected fragrance from plants that do not look fragrant — these qualities ensure that the garden continues to communicate over time, that it is not exhausted by a single glance.
Fourth, the principle of persistence: a garden that builds gradually, accumulating structure and meaning with each passing year. This principle argues for the inclusion of long-lived perennials and shrubs alongside the annuals and biennials that provide immediate seasonal colour. A well-placed rose, a mature lavender, an established rosemary — these become permanent features of a garden’s character in a way that a bed of annual pansies cannot.
Fifth, the principle of personal reference: a garden that includes, wherever possible, plants that are specific to the relationship being honoured rather than simply symbolically appropriate in the general sense. If a mother has always loved dahlias, plant dahlias, even if they carry no particular symbolic freight in Victorian florography. If a grandmother raised chrysanthemums on the kitchen windowsill, plant chrysanthemums in the border that honours her. The most powerful symbolic gesture in any garden is the one that says: I know you. I know what you love. I made this place for you specifically, not for some generalised ideal of motherhood but for this particular mother, this specific love, this relationship that exists between exactly these two people.
A Mother’s Day Border: A Planting Plan
What follows is not a prescriptive plan but an outline of possibilities — a starting point from which any gardener can develop a planting suited to their own conditions, their own taste, and the specific qualities of the relationship they wish to honour.
The border should run from west to east where possible, with the tallest plants at the back and the lowest at the front, and with the general planting philosophy of the English country house border — structural plants carrying the framework through the season, billowing herbaceous perennials providing the season’s main colour, and edging plants of smaller character providing intimacy at the path’s edge.
At the back, structural plants with symbolic weight: the climbing rose ‘Madame Alfred Carrière’ (white, repeat-flowering, tolerance of north-facing aspects) on a wall or trellis, accompanied by Wisteria sinensis for late spring spectacular flowering; perhaps a specimen tree peony (Paeonia suffruticosa ‘Joseph Rock,’ with its enormous white flowers with maroon blotches) for sheer extravagance in late April; a standard rosemary for evergreen winter interest and spring pollinator value.
In the middle ground, the main flowering plants: Rosa ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ (strongly fragrant, rich pink, repeat-flowering) carrying the rose symbolism through from June onwards; Paeonia lactiflora ‘Sarah Bernhardt’ (soft pink, strongly fragrant) in June; Iris ‘Jane Phillips’ (pale blue, elegantly formed) in late May and early June; Allium ‘Gladiator’ (large purple balls) in May; Nepeta ‘Six Hills Giant’ (lavender-blue, powerfully fragrant when crushed) as a long-season filler; Salvia nemorosa ‘Caradonna’ (deep violet, architectural) for late summer; and Phlox paniculata ‘Starfire’ (deep red, strongly fragrant) for late summer colour.
At the front, the intimate plants: sweet violets (Viola odorata) as edging, supplemented by creeping thyme (Thymus serpyllum) for fragrant walking access; Dianthus ‘Mrs Sinkins’ (old double pink, powerfully clove-scented) as a traditional front-of-border plant; Forget-me-nots (Myosotis sylvatica) as self-sowing spring biennials; and Primula vulgaris naturalised in any slightly shadier spots.
For spring bulbs, planted in autumn for May display: tulips in a pink and white scheme (perhaps ‘Angelique,’ the fully double, peony-flowered pink tulip, mixed with ‘White Triumphator’ for an airy, formal effect); narcissus ‘Thalia’ (creamy white, multi-headed, delicate and fragrant) among the shrubs; Camassia leichtlinii (blue-violet, tall and architectural) for late spring; and Allium hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’ as a bridge between the spring and early summer seasons.
The Cut Flower Garden
A separate consideration for the gardener who wishes to create a Mother’s Day cutting garden — a bed or beds dedicated specifically to producing flowers for cutting — the key principles are slightly different from those of the ornamental border. Here, the emphasis should be on:
Long vase life: plants that will hold their flowers for at least a week in water, allowing the gift to be enjoyed properly. Carnations and pinks (Dianthus), sweet peas (Lathyrus odoratus), statice (Limonium), and many of the annual and perennial salvias are notable for their vase longevity.
Seasonal succession: a cutting garden that produces flowers from March through October requires careful planning to ensure that there is always something at peak cutting condition. Tulips and narcissus for spring; sweet peas, roses, and hardy annuals (cornflowers, larkspur, ammi) for early summer; dahlias, gladioli, and late roses for late summer; chrysanthemums and late dahlias for autumn.
Fragrance: the cutting garden is the best place to grow the most intensely fragrant varieties of each flower, even if their garden performance is less spectacular than more visually impressive cultivars. An unscented rose is a lesser thing than a fragrant one; an unscented sweet pea is a contradiction in terms. Fragrance in cut flowers is worth prioritising even at some cost to flower size or visual impact.
Volume: a cutting garden needs to produce flowers in quantity, because a sparse bunch of flowers — however beautiful the individual specimens — lacks the generosity of spirit that a cutting garden is designed to produce. Plant sweet peas in long rows and pick them twice a week; plant dahlias in groups of three or five and dead-head conscientiously; plant cornflowers thickly enough to harvest a full vase every few days through the cutting season.
Part Nine: Global Traditions — Mother’s Day Flowers Around the World
Japan: White Carnations and the Gift of Colour
Japan adopted Mother’s Day (Haha no Hi) in the early twentieth century, partly under American influence, and initially followed the Jarvis tradition of white carnations. But Japanese Mother’s Day customs developed their own character, incorporating the Japanese aesthetic preference for simplicity, seasonal appropriateness, and the expression of complex emotion through restrained gesture.
In contemporary Japan, white carnations remain associated with mothers who have died, while red or pink carnations are given to living mothers — a direct borrowing from the Jarvis tradition. But the Japanese context transforms even this borrowed symbolism: in a culture where gift-giving is a highly developed art form and where the presentation of a gift is considered at least as important as the gift itself, the selection and wrapping of Mother’s Day flowers has an additional dimension of meaning. A single, perfect carnation, presented with thoughtful wrapping and a carefully chosen card, may communicate more in Japan than an extravagant bouquet presented casually.
The Japanese concept of mono no aware — the awareness of impermanence, the bittersweet appreciation of things precisely because they will not last — gives all flower-giving in Japan an additional layer of meaning. Flowers are the most impermanent of gifts; they will die within days. But this impermanence is not a deficiency: it is part of what makes them precious, part of what concentrates the attention and deepens the appreciation. A Japanese Mother’s Day bouquet is beautiful partly because it will not last, because its beauty is a form of urgency, a reminder to appreciate what is present while it is present.
Mexico: Marigolds and the Day of the Dead Dimension
In Mexico, Mother’s Day (Día de las Madres) on 10th May is one of the most important occasions in the national calendar, second in commercial terms only to Christmas. The flowers associated with Mexican Mother’s Day include roses, lilies, and carnations in familiar Western form, but the distinctively Mexican dimension is the presence of cempasúchil — the Mexican marigold (Tagetes erecta), the same flower that is used in enormous quantities to decorate altars for the Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos) in October and November.
The cempasúchil’s connection to both Mother’s Day and the Day of the Dead is not coincidental: it reflects the Mexican cultural tradition of celebrating the continuing relationship between the living and the dead, including dead mothers whose memory is actively maintained through ritual and offering. The marigold’s bright orange colour (the most vivid in the Aztec chromatic tradition) was associated with the sun and with the fierce energy of life itself; its strong, somewhat medicinal fragrance was believed to guide the spirits of the dead back to the world of the living for their annual celebration. In this context, giving marigolds to a living mother carries within it the awareness of the full span of the maternal relationship — from birth to death and beyond it.
This Mexican dimension of Mother’s Day flower symbolism is worth contemplating even for gardeners in the British tradition, because it makes explicit something that the more sentimental aspects of Western Mother’s Day culture tend to suppress: that honouring a mother means honouring the whole of the relationship, including the awareness that it will end, including the grief that ending will bring, including the continuing love that death does not extinguish. The marigold, with its fierce colour and its uncompromising fragrance, is honest in a way that a delicate pink carnation may not be.
In the British garden, Tagetes erecta and its smaller cousin Tagetes patula (the French marigold) are reliable, easy, warm-season annuals that contribute colour and a measure of pest-deterrence to the vegetable garden as well as the ornamental border. Their strong fragrance — which some find powerful but which others, particularly those with Mexican or Latin American cultural associations, find rich with meaning — is worth taking seriously as a form of plant symbolism that sits outside the European florography tradition but carries its own considerable charge.
France: Lily of the Valley and the First of May
In France, Mother’s Day is celebrated in late May or early June, depending on the year, but the floral tradition most closely associated with French maternal symbolism in the spring is connected not to Mother’s Day itself but to the first of May — La Fête du Muguet, the Festival of the Lily of the Valley.
On 1st May (which is also the Fête du Travail, Labour Day), the French tradition is to give small bunches of lily of the valley (muguet, Convallaria majalis) to those they love, as a symbol of happiness and good luck for the coming spring and summer. The tradition dates from at least the sixteenth century, when Charles IX received a sprig of lily of the valley as a token of luck and was so charmed by it that he began giving it as a gift to his court ladies each year on 1st May. By the nineteenth century the tradition had spread through French society, and today the streets of French cities fill briefly on 1st May morning with informal sellers of lily of the valley, with street vendors and neighbours and friends pressing small bunches into one another’s hands.
The lily of the valley’s symbolism — happiness, the return of joy after sorrow, the sweetness of the domestic — makes it an extraordinarily appropriate flower for maternal celebration. Its small, bell-shaped flowers are carried in one-sided racemes on arching stems, and they nod downward in a gesture of modest self-presentation that recalls the violet. The fragrance is extraordinary: one of the most complex and beloved in the entire plant kingdom, the source of a perfume note used in countless luxury fragrances, a smell so specifically associated with spring and happiness and the particular quality of damp, warm May mornings that it is impossible to encounter it without experiencing some version of the emotional response that all great scents produce.
In the garden, lily of the valley is a plant of considerable independence. Once established in the right conditions — partial shade, moisture-retentive soil, cool root-run — it will spread quietly and persistently, colonising the area beneath deciduous trees and shrubs, appearing each spring with reliable punctuality to offer its modest flowers and extraordinary fragrance. It is one of those plants that, once established, asks for virtually nothing and gives consistently and generously in return — which is, perhaps, a not unfair description of the motherly ideal.
Part Ten: Contemporary Practice — Symbolic Gardening for the Modern Relationship
The Changed Landscape of Maternal Relationships
The plant symbolism explored in this guide has developed over centuries, in cultures that had relatively fixed ideas about what motherhood was and what it looked like. Contemporary British society contains a much wider variety of maternal relationships and configurations: single parents, adoptive parents, foster parents, stepparents, grandparents raising grandchildren, same-sex couples with children, the friends and aunts and neighbours who have functioned as maternal figures for children whose own mothers were absent or unable to care for them.
The symbolic language of flowers, for all its historical richness, has no separate vocabulary for these different kinds of maternal relationship. But that is itself an important observation: flowers do not discriminate. The rose that expresses love for a biological mother expresses exactly the same love for an adoptive mother, a stepmother, a grandmother who raised you, a friend’s mother who became your own. The language of flowers is, at its heart, the language of love — and love does not require a specific biological or legal relationship to be real.
For the contemporary gardener, the task of symbolic planting is not to find historically specific flowers for historically specific relationships, but to find flowers that speak truthfully to the actual relationship being honoured. This may mean departing from the traditional Mother’s Day palette entirely — choosing flowers that have personal significance to the specific relationship rather than culturally assigned meanings. It may mean creating new symbolic associations: if a maternal figure loves a particular flower that carries no traditional symbolic freight, that flower can become the emblem of the relationship simply through the act of giving it with intention.
The most radical and powerful piece of advice this guide can offer is this: choose flowers that you and the person you’re honouring both know. Choose a flower you have discussed, or admired together, or that grows in a garden you share. Choose a flower that carries within it a specific memory. A sprig of the wisteria that was blooming when you sat together on that particular afternoon. A cutting from the rose that grew against her childhood home. Seeds from the sweet peas you grew together the summer before she became ill. These are not symbolic flowers in the Victorian sense — they do not carry meanings assigned by a florist’s dictionary. But they carry something more powerful than any assigned meaning: they carry a true, specific, particular memory of love between two particular people. And that is the highest form of floral symbolism available to any gardener.
Sustainable Symbolism: Growing Flowers with Intention
There is, finally, a dimension of contemporary Mother’s Day flower symbolism that the Victorian language of flowers could not have anticipated: the ecological dimension. The contemporary gardener is aware, as no previous generation has been, of the environmental cost of cut flowers — the carbon footprint of flowers flown from Kenya or Colombia or the Netherlands, the pesticide use in industrial cut-flower production, the water consumption of heated glasshouses.
For the symbolically-minded gardener, this ecological awareness adds an additional layer of meaning to the act of growing one’s own flowers for Mother’s Day. A flower grown in one’s own garden, without pesticides, in soil tended by hand, and cut on the morning it is to be given — this flower says something additional to whatever symbolic meaning it carries by tradition. It says: I made this. I took care of this. I attended to it over weeks and months, protecting it from slugs, tying it in, watering it in dry spells, watching it develop from bud to flower. I did all of this for you, because you are worth the time and attention that growing things requires.
This is, perhaps, the deepest and most contemporary reading of Mother’s Day floral symbolism available to us: the grown flower, rather than the bought flower, as the truest expression of the kind of love that is expressed not in dramatic gestures but in sustained, daily attention. The love that is visible not as a single gift but as an accumulation of small acts — of watering and feeding and staking and dead-heading, of going out in the rain to check on something that matters, of knowing what another person loves and taking care to provide it.
The garden, in this reading, is itself a form of love. Not just the flowers it produces but the whole practice of gardening — the daily attention to living things, the knowledge of their needs and characters, the pleasure taken in their flourishing — is a way of being in relationship with the world that has something genuinely maternal about it. A gardener knows, in their bones, the truth that a good mother knows: that growth is slow, that it cannot be hurried, that it requires the right conditions and patient care, and that when it finally comes — when the rose opens, when the sweet pea blooms, when the wisteria finally produces its first spectacular flowering after years of patient establishment — it is worth everything it cost.
A Final Word: The Flower and the Face
We return, as we must, to the May morning with which we began: the particular quality of light, the garden in full flower, the arms full of something cut from the border that carries within it every warm kitchen and every loving relationship we have ever known.
The language of flowers is not merely the Victorian florography catalogued in nineteenth-century manuals, though that tradition has given us much. It is not only the classical mythology of Demeter and Persephone, though that story tells us something profoundly true about the connection between maternal love and the earth’s fertility. It is not exclusively the tradition of Mothering Sunday and its hedgerow posies, though that tradition reminds us of the importance of the gift made with one’s own hands and gathered from the real world.
The language of flowers is all of these things together, and it is also something that cannot be codified or catalogued: the specific, private, unassignable meaning that any particular flower has for any particular person in any particular relationship. The primrose that grew on the bank where a mother and child sat and talked every afternoon through one difficult summer. The sweet pea that she grew in rows and he picked for her in armfuls, not knowing what he was doing but knowing that it was right. The old rose that has been in the family garden longer than anyone can remember, whose name is not known, whose history has been lost, but whose flowers return every year in the same extravagant, fragrant rush, faithful beyond all expectation.
These are the flowers that matter most. Not the ones chosen because a dictionary said they meant love, but the ones that have become, through the specific alchemy of a specific relationship in a specific garden over specific years, the living language of that love. The dictionary is a starting point, a vocabulary lesson, an introduction to a language whose grammar we must learn by speaking it with the people we care about most.
Grow flowers. Cut them with your own hands. Give them with your whole heart, and know what you mean by the giving. The flowers will do the rest.
This guide is dedicated to all gardeners who have learned, through years of attention to growing things, that the most important knowledge a garden can teach is the knowledge of how to care for another living thing — how to be patient with it, how to understand what it needs, how to rejoice in its flourishing, and how to grieve, gracefully and without bitterness, when it is time for it to go.
Appendix: A Seasonal Calendar of Mother’s Day Flowers
January and February: The Flowers of Patience
January and February offer little in the way of conventional Mother’s Day flowers, but they are not without their symbolic gifts. The snowdrop (Galanthus nivalis), appearing sometimes as early as late January in sheltered positions, carries the symbolism of hope and consolation — it is the flower that proves that light is returning even when the cold insists otherwise. The Christmas rose and Lenten rose (Helleborus niger and Helleborus orientalis), flowering through the darkest months in colours from purest white through every shade of pink and purple to nearly black, speak of resilience and beauty under conditions that would daunt a less determined plant.
For the gardener planning a year-round tribute to a maternal figure, these winter-flowering plants are essential: they say that the love being expressed does not wait for optimal conditions, does not hold back until the weather is perfect and the timing is right. They flower in January and February because they flower then, because that is when they are needed, because the garden would be immeasurably poorer without them.
The witch hazels (Hamamelis) — flowering from late November through February on bare branches in extraordinary spidery yellow, orange, and red flowers that are both beautiful and powerful in fragrance — add to the winter garden’s symbolic vocabulary the quality of resilience combined with extravagance: the audacity of producing these elaborate, fragrant flowers at the coldest, darkest time of year. A well-established Hamamelis mollis ‘Pallida’ (soft yellow, strongly fragrant, a generous and reliable variety) is one of the garden’s finest winter moments, and a fine emblem of the love that asserts its warmth even when the conditions are against it.
March and April: The Flowers of Mothering Sunday
This is the season of Mothering Sunday, and the flowers are those of the English countryside in its earliest spring expression: primroses, violets, wood anemones, early daffodils. In the garden, this is also the season of hellebores at their peak, of the first muscari (grape hyacinths, whose deep blue carries the symbolic weight of fidelity and spring hope), of the early tulips in their stately elegance, and of the forsythia whose prodigal yellow flowering is the most cheerful of all garden sights on a grey March day.
The cherry blossom (Prunus varieties) that fills gardens and streets from late March through April carries its own rich symbolic vocabulary — primarily from Japanese tradition, where sakura is the supreme emblem of beauty that knows itself to be brief, of the awareness of impermanence that is central to Japanese aesthetics. Cherry blossom in the Western garden carries some of this meaning through cultural osmosis, and its extraordinary brief flowering — a week or two of pure beauty before the petals fall and the world moves on — makes it an apt emblem of the Mothering Sunday season.
May: The Peak of the Mother’s Day Garden
May is the month of Mother’s Day in most of the world, and the English garden in May is at something close to its absolute best. The trees are fully leaved but in that fresh, new-green shade that will darken to the heavier tones of summer. The late spring bulbs are reaching their peak — alliums rising above the emerging herbaceous foliage in purple spheres; camassias adding their tall blue spires to the border; late tulips in every possible colour and form. The wallflowers and forget-me-nots, planted in autumn, are at their magnificent best. The first roses are beginning in sheltered spots, the peonies are in bud, and the lilac and wisteria are at their most spectacular.
It is a month of almost overwhelming floral abundance, and the challenge for the symbolic gardener is not to find meaning but to select from the extraordinary quantity of meaning available. Every flower in the May garden has something to say. The task is to arrange the conversation so that the most important things are said most clearly — to design the garden so that what it communicates, in its totality, is the feeling that is being expressed: of love that is abundant, patient, fragrant, multi-layered, resilient, and beautiful, exactly as the May garden itself.
June, July, and August: The Summer of Roses
The summer months bring the great flowering of the rose garden, the peak of lavender and other Mediterranean herbs, the midsummer festival of the border at its most complex and generous. For the symbolically intentional gardener, this is the season of roses in their full expression — the season when every message that a rose can carry is available, when the garden can speak in full sentences rather than single words.
The dahlia, beginning in July and reaching its peak in August and September, carries its own symbolism that sits outside the traditional Mother’s Day vocabulary but deserves acknowledgement: commitment, dignity, and the kind of love that does not give up when summer is ending. Dahlias flower when other garden plants are beginning to decline; they come into their own as the days shorten, as the light changes, as autumn begins to make itself felt. There is something stoic and admirable about the dahlia’s timing — something that speaks of the love that continues and deepens even as the conditions become more challenging.
September, October, and November: The Autumn of Endurance
Autumn brings its own symbolic vocabulary: the late roses that carry their flowers into October in most British gardens; the sedums whose flat-topped flower heads provide late-season nectar for bees and butterflies; the asters in their purple and white and pink; the Japanese anemones in their simple elegance; and the first of the early winter-flowering shrubs that bridge the gap between the dying year and the beginning of the new.
The symbolism of the autumn garden is inevitably connected to endings and to the awareness of time. But endings are not only losses. They are also completions — the full expression of something that began in spring and has been growing through the long summer months. The autumn garden at its best is not a garden in decline but a garden at the culmination of its year: rich with fruit, still flowering, still beautiful, but with the beauty of completion rather than the beauty of beginnings.
For the garden that honours a mother, this autumnal symbolism has its own appropriateness. A relationship of many years’ standing is not less beautiful than a new one; it is differently beautiful — with the complexity and depth that only time can produce, with the knowledge of having come through difficulties together, with the fragrance that accumulates through shared experience as surely as the fragrance of a rose intensifies in a warm afternoon.
December: The Winter Promise
The garden in December seems bare, but it is not empty. The structural plants are most visible now — the shapes of trees and shrubs, the patterns of branches against the sky, the evergreens that maintain the garden’s sense of being a living place rather than a dormant one. And in sheltered spots, the first snowdrops may already be pushing their tips through the soil, not yet flowering but already present, already beginning the long preparation for January’s first blooms.
For the symbolic gardener, December is the month of promise — of the garden as it will be rather than as it is, of the year’s beginning held within the year’s ending. A garden that has been planned and planted with care, that carries within it the symbolic intentions we have been exploring throughout this guide, is at no point more fully itself than in December, when its future can be seen in the structure that remains when the flowers have gone and the leaves have fallen.
December’s symbolic flowers are those of the Christmas rose (Helleborus niger), the winter aconite (Eranthis hyemalis) just beginning to stir, the paper-white narcissus that can be grown indoors for fragrance, and the Sarcococca (Christmas box), whose tiny flowers produce a fragrance entirely out of proportion to their size — one of the most magical of all winter garden moments. These are the flowers of the dark, of the cold, of the long night — and they are also, for exactly that reason, among the most hopeful flowers the garden contains.
They say: I am here. I have not gone. The cold does not extinguish what is essential. When the time is right, the flowering will come again. It always comes again.
This is the final, simplest, and most enduring message of the Mother’s Day garden: that love, like the garden that honours it, is not seasonal. It flowers visibly in May, brilliantly in June and July, persistently through the autumn, and quietly but unmistakably through the winter. It is always there, always tending toward expression, always preparing for the next flowering.
Grow it with all the care and knowledge and love you have. It will repay you, as a garden always repays its gardener, with more than you put in.