Gifting flowers is generally a welcomed gesture. Showing up for a visit, bouquet in hand, offers a curated, fragrant beauty to a recipient, telegraphing forethought without foisting yet another knick-knack that might not spark joy. But it turns out that, according to a complex Victorian-era meaning system, bringing your host a beautiful bunch of flowers may well have an ignoble ulterior motive that wishes someone ill if they understand the coded meanings behind the cradled, paper-wrapped offering. Grateful giftees: beware.
Floral Estrangements (Chronicle, 2025), the new book by Brooklyn-based writer Rebecca Fishbein, A&S '11, is a field guide to flowery symbolism through a glass-half-empty lens, explaining—in a cozy second-person that makes it sound like an author is chatting to a confidant over candlelit drinks—how to send scathing floral messages to frenemies, exes, or anyone else who warrants disconcertingly ambivalent messaging.
In a light, jaunty read that combines myth and history with wry understatement, Fishbein offers brief profiles of 50 vengeful flowers, ranging from the merely miffed to the truly hate-filled, then combines meanings into floral phrases to create a host of arrangements laden with tongue-in-cheek significance, with dedicated sections for bad lovers, bad friends, and bad, well, everyone else. The "Congratulations on being the favorite child!" bouquet, for example, includes flowers that mean jealousy, egotism, and resentment. "It won't give you their life," she writes, "but it might make them sneeze a little."
The "His mommy issues are now your problem" bouquet paints a vignette of a woman tempted to be jealous of her ex-boyfriend's new paramour. The illustration of the resulting arrangement is a withered white rose (you made no impression), pine (pity), and purple delphinium (haughtiness) whose petals, accompanied by teardrops, fall off the buds into a black void of a background. "It's a lovely way to welcome her to her new life of playing girlfriend, mother, therapist, and housekeeper—every girl's wish," writes Fishbein. The book is equal parts informative and entertaining, for friends who have a lot to express but struggle to articulate it.
Posted in Arts+Culture
