Language of Flowers
- Diamond Zhou
- Jul 19
- 16 min read
welcome to our
SATURDAY EVENING POST
July 19th, 2025
Flowers have long captivated artists across cultures, not only for their beauty but for their rich symbolic potential. From Western to Eastern art, floral imagery has helped create a visual language laden with cultural, spiritual, and political meaning.
In Western art, flowers have spoken in a symbolic dialect from the Middle Ages onward. In Christian iconography, specific blooms carried sacred meanings. For example, the white lily, often painted in Annunciation scenes, signified the Virgin Mary’s purity and chastity. Countless Renaissance and Baroque paintings include a vase of lilies by Mary’s side or in the archangel Gabriel’s hand, visually highlighting her virtue and the divine incarnation (as seen in works by artists like Leonardo and Jan van Eyck). Similarly, red roses in these works might allude to Christ’s blood or the love of the Virgin, while other saints carried their own floral attributes, creating a widely understood symbolic code for devout viewers.
Beyond religious settings, flowers also populated allegorical and mythological scenes to enrich their meaning. Sandro Botticelli’s famous Primavera (c. 1480) is a prime example, an elaborate mythological tableau celebrating spring. In this large painting, the garden of Venus is carpeted with over a hundred identifiable spring blossoms, from violets to irises, meticulously rendered as if in a late Gothic millefleur tapestry. Botticelli’s floral profusion is not mere decoration; it reinforces the painting’s allegory of burgeoning fertility and renewal in nature. The figure of Flora (Roman goddess of flowers), shown in a flower-patterned gown dispersing blooms, personifies the fecundity and rebirth of spring. Through such details, Botticelli and his contemporaries tapped into the classical and poetic associations of flowers, linking the cycles of nature to themes of love, growth, and transcendence in a visual language their humanist, well-read patrons would appreciate.
By the 17th century, the symbolic language of flowers reached new heights in the Dutch Golden Age, when still-life paintings of flower bouquets became a prized genre. Collectors marveled at the technical virtuosity of painters like Rachel Ruysch, Jan Brueghel, and Ambrosius Bosschaert, who portrayed petals and leaves with jewel-like precision. Yet these flower pieces were never just pretty pictures, they were richly encoded with meaning. Often, the bouquets included blooms from different seasons (tulips, roses, irises, etc.) improbably all in bloom at once, signalling that the arrangement was allegorical rather than literal.
Dutch viewers of the time understood many of the symbols: a rose with fallen petals signified the ephemerality of beauty and love; a vivid tulip evoked the folly of worldly greed (especially a striped rarity like the Semper Augustus tulip, infamous from the “Tulip Mania” boom-and-bust). Insects crawling on the leaves – a fly, a caterpillar – hinted at decay or metamorphosis; and any wilted or browning flowers were a vanitas motif reminding viewers that all living things perish. More positively, certain blooms carried virtuous connotations: lilies of the valley and carnations might stand for purity or the Virgin Mary’s virtues, strawberries for fertile abundance. These paintings, often destined for wealthy burgher homes, thus operated on two levels: displaying the owner’s scientific and worldly knowledge (exotic botany from across the globe) and imparting moral messages on the transience of life and the importance of the spirit over the flesh. As one art historian noted, much of this floral “syntax” is a lost language today, but in the 1600s viewers were fluent, a bouquet of silent flowers spoke volumes about vanity, virtue, life and death.
The 19th century saw a revival of interest in floral symbolism, notably in the Victorian era’s “language of flowers.” Bouquets were given coded meanings (a red camellia for passion, a yellow rose for jealousy, etc.), and painters of the Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite schools wove these meanings into their works. An iconic example is John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1852), which depicts Shakespeare’s tragic heroine floating amid a stream brimming with flowers. Millais painstakingly painted each botanical detail from life, and many of those flowers carry symbolic weight. Ophelia wears a garland of violets around her neck – symbol of faithfulness and chastity (and, ominously, of early death). Pansies drift by her legs, signifying unrequited love. In the water, Millais added a striking red poppy (not mentioned in Shakespeare’s text) right by Ophelia’s open hand, which is a clear symbol of sleep and death. These clues would not have been lost on Victorian viewers enamoured with floriography. The painting’s lush, overgrown setting communicates Ophelia’s fate and state of mind through flowers as much as through her pose, immersing the learned viewer in a “bouquet” of layered meanings and literary allusions.
Vincent van Gogh famously created multiple series of flower paintings in the 1880s, from humble irises and blossoming orchards to his iconic sunflower still lifes. Van Gogh loved the expressiveness of flowers: he wrote that his sunflower paintings “communicated ‘gratitude’”. In fact, he painted sunflowers to decorate the room of his friend Paul Gauguin, hoping the radiant yellow blooms would exude a spirit of welcome and friendship in their shared “Yellow House” in Arles. The sunflowers, varying from full bloom to drooping decay, also subtly illustrate life’s cycle, which is a theme Van Gogh saw as profound. (He once mused that sunflowers, which turn toward the sun, might symbolize loyalty or hope in the face of darkness.)
In the early 20th century, the language of flowers took on new, often more personal forms. American modernist Georgia O’Keeffe, for instance, made the close-up flower her signature subject. She magnified blooms like irises, calla lilies, and poppies to monumental scales, isolating their curves and colours. Critics (especially male critics) quickly imposed Freudian interpretations, claiming her flowers were veiled depictions of female anatomy and sexuality, a reading O’Keeffe vehemently denied for decades. “I decided that if I could paint that flower on a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty,” O’Keeffe explained, emphasizing seeing the flower for itself. Regardless of interpretation, O’Keeffe’s paintings, such as her Red Canna or Jimson Weed/White Flower, did challenge viewers to find emotional and symbolic meaning in natural forms. In a sense, she reinvented floral symbolism for modern art by focusing on shape and colour, inviting multiple readings (sensual, spiritual, or simply appreciation of nature’s form). This expresses a key point in the legacy of floral art, that each era rediscovers flowers’ potential afresh, whether as symbols of the divine, tokens of love and loss, or expressions of inner vision.
It is worth noting that flowers also bloomed in modern art as emblems of peace and protest. The 1960s “Flower Power” movement, though outside traditional painting, exemplified how a flower (a daisy in a rifle barrel, a marigold in a protester’s hair) became a universal symbol of non-violent resistance and hope. Such gestures were famously captured in press photos (for example, a 1967 image of an anti-war protester placing flowers in soldiers’ gun barrels) and in the broader counterculture ethos. Street artist Banksy later immortalized this idea in his graffiti mural of a protester throwing a bouquet instead of a Molotov cocktail. In Love Is In The Air (Flower Thrower) (2003), Banksy depicts a masked figure poised to hurl a bundle of flowers like a grenade, a powerful inversion. The figure’s aggressive stance contrasts with the bouquet of blooms, which “symbolize hope” in the face of oppression. As art critics note, the piece is a “universal call for peaceful resistance”, urging change through flowers rather than violence. Such images prove that the historical language of flowers, as symbols of love, life, and defiance, remains instantly legible and emotionally powerful.
By the mid-20th century, approaches to floral imagery in Western art had diverged in intriguing ways. Pop Art applied a new lens: in 1964 Andy Warhol famously created a series of garishly coloured silkscreen prints titled Flowers, which were a surprising departure from his usual consumer icons. Warhol’s Flowers presented hibiscus blossoms as flat, stylized shapes in bold hues, repeated across canvases. These prints were deliberately “apolitical and removed from time and space,” portraying blooms as ubiquitous, almost anonymous motifs rather than specific symbols. Warhol appropriated the image from a magazine photograph and replicated it endlessly via mechanical screen-printing, thus stripping the flower of unique context and transforming it into a comment on mass production and timeless beauty. Critics observed that unlike his Campbell’s Soup cans or Marilyn portraits, the Flowers series wasn’t tied to a brand or personality, that flowers are iconic and universal, “untethered to a particular pop culture reference”. In effect, Warhol neutralized the traditional “language” of flowers to explore questions of art and reproducibility. The result turned a classic still-life subject into a cool, impersonal design, an ironic echo of centuries of floral symbolism, now flattened into pure colour and form.
Conversely, feminist artists of the 1970s reclaimed floral imagery with new fervour and meaning. They transformed what had often been seen as a genteel or feminine motif into bold statements about female experience. A landmark example is Judy Chicago’s installation The Dinner Party (1979), a symbolic banquet honouring women in history. Each place setting in this large triangular table includes a ceramic plate adorned with a brightly painted, sculpted motif. Notably, many plates feature “butterfly- or flower-like” forms that are actually stylized vulvae. Chicago quite literally merged petals and female anatomy. By doing so, she reclaimed the flower as an emblem of women’s sexuality, creative power, and agency. This was a deliberate upending of the traditional passive “flower-as-woman” trope; instead of a flower symbolizing a demure maiden, Chicago’s floral vulvas assert the presence of female identity at the table of history. As Chicago stated, The Dinner Party was meant to show that women can be “prime symbol-makers, to remake the world in our own image”. The use of floral imagery in this context was an act of resistance against a male-dominated art canon, essentially a blossoming of feminist visual language.
In Eastern art histories flowers and plants have been no less significant in building a visual language. Traditional East Asian art often treats flora not as mere background decoration, but as subjects worthy of deep poetic and symbolic portrayal. The symbolism, however, evolved within different philosophical and cultural frameworks.
Chinese painting has a whole genre devoted to birds-and-flowers (花鸟huaniao hua), and within it a core repertoire known as the “Four Gentlemen”: the plum blossom, orchid, bamboo, and chrysanthemum. These plants have been celebrated in Chinese poetry and painting since ancient times for embodying virtues of the ideal Confucian gentleman or scholar. By the Song dynasty (960–1279) and especially the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), scholar-artists deliberately used these floral motifs to convey moral and personal meanings in a subtle visual code.
The orchid, for example, had been associated with noble character since at least the Warring States period, thanks to poet Qu Yuan. Its delicate fragrance hidden in remote valleys made it a symbol of the modest, principled gentleman who remains virtuous even in obscurity. The bamboo, ever-green and resilient, symbolised integrity and flexibility, it bends in storm winds but does not break. This made bamboo an emblem of survival in adversity and steadfastness. The plum blossom (mei), which blooms in the harsh winter cold, came to represent purity, perseverance, and hope amid hardship. Its fragile white or pink blossoms emerging from icy branches stood for the scholar’s unyielding integrity in the face of hardship or corrupt surroundings. The chrysanthemum, an autumn flower that blooms after others have faded, was admired by reclusive poets (like Tao Yuanming) as a symbol of contented solitude and the virtue of detachment from worldly concerns.
Artists often painted these subjects in ink monochrome or light colours, pairing them with inscriptions of poems. A viewer well-versed in literature would immediately catch the allusions. For instance, a Yuan dynasty painter might depict an isolated orchid in ink and include a poem about loyalty, a coded protest against foreign Mongol rule. Indeed, many Chinese literati used flower painting as a vehicle for expressing political loyalty or resistance in turbulent times. A famous case is Zheng Sixiao’s Ink Orchid (1306). Zheng was a Song loyalist who refused to serve the conquering Yuan (Mongol) dynasty. In his painting, he depicted a simple orchid plant with no earth around its roots. When asked why the orchid had no ground, Zheng replied that “the earth had been stolen by the barbarians,” a bold metaphor: the homeland had been taken by invaders, leaving the loyal orchid uprooted. The image of the delicate orchid floating rootless thus symbolized Zheng himself, “rootless and vulnerable but with a quiet integrity” in exile. Such subtle yet powerful symbolism was typical of Chinese scholar-art.
Many other plants populate the lexicon of Chinese art symbolism: the lotus, for instance, is deeply embedded in Buddhist and Daoist thought as an emblem of purity (unstained by the mud it grows from) and spiritual enlightenment. A famous saying by scholar Zhou Dunyi encapsulates this: “I love the lotus because while growing from mud, it is unstained”. In countless paintings and sculptures, Buddhas or bodhisattvas sit on lotus thrones, signifying divine purity and transcendence. The lotus’s ability to rise immaculate from murky waters made it a widespread symbol of resilience and spiritual rebirth across Eastern cultures. (In Indian and Himalayan art, too, the lotus is a sacred icon: Hindu and Buddhist deities are often depicted atop lotus blossoms or holding lotus flowers, representing their awakened, compassionate state beyond worldly suffering. Meanwhile, the chrysanthemum and lotus also had seasonal associations (autumn and summer respectively) and were linked to virtues of humility or purity. The plum blossom carried the weight of resilience and was also adopted by some Chinese painters as a symbol of loyalist defiance (blooming despite the winter of foreign rule). These rich associations formed a highly developed floral language in Chinese art, wherein a simple branch of blossoms could convey poems and political meaning understood by the cognoscenti.
If one floral symbol from Eastern art is universally recognized, it is perhaps the Japanese sakura or cherry blossom. In Japanese culture, cherry blossoms have been celebrated for centuries in art, poetry, and public life (the practice of hanami, or flower-viewing, dates back to at least the 8th century). The delicate pink cherry blossoms carry layered meanings, most centred on the concept of the ephemeral nature of beauty and life. Because the blossoms burst into gorgeous bloom and then within a week or two fall to the ground, they have long symbolized the transient, fleeting quality of existence. This idea of appreciating the momentary peak of beauty with the awareness that it will soon fade is a core aesthetic in Japan, tied to Buddhist-influenced notions of impermanence (無常, mujo).
In Edo-period Japan (17th–19th centuries), woodblock print artists like Utagawa Hiroshige frequently depicted famous cherry blossom viewing sites, such as Ueno Park or Gotenyama in Edo, with crowds enjoying the blooms. These prints are more than picturesque travel images; they communicate the cultural reverence for sakura. Often the landscapes include subtle motifs of time passing: drifting petals, evening light, distant vistas, all evoking a gentle melancholy (known as mono no aware, the wistful awareness of impermanence). As Japanese writings explained, cherry blossoms were likened to the samurai ethos: the samurai’s life, like the bloom, was glorious yet could be cut short at any moment. In fact, in the medieval period, fallen cherry petals were seen as metaphors for warriors who fell in their prime, sacrificing themselves honourably. This symbolism persisted, even into modern history, such as World War II, when kamikaze pilots painted sakura on their planes or referred to falling blossoms as a metaphor for their own self-sacrifice. Thus, in Japanese art and culture, cherry blossoms encapsulate a poignant duality: life and death, beauty and the pathos of loss.
Other flowers carry weight in East Asian art as well. The chrysanthemum in Japan (as in China) symbolizes longevity and rejuvenation, it’s the emblem of the Imperial family, often seen in the Imperial Seal and on artworks celebrating the emperor. The iris appears in classical poetry and Edo prints as a harbinger of summer. And the pine tree and bamboo, while not flowers, are part of the revered “Three Friends of Winter” (with plum blossom), together symbolizing perseverance and steadfastness in adversity. Japanese Rinpa artists like Ogata Kōrin famously painted irises and morning glories in lavish colour (e.g. Kōrin’s “Irises” screen, c. 1705, references an 11th-century poem about nostalgia for a lost lover via a marsh of irises). In all cases, the visual portrayal of these plants in Eastern art is rarely empty of context, it resonates with literary, spiritual, or historical significance.
While Western and Eastern art traditions have distinct histories, there have been moments of dialogue and shared fascination through floral imagery. The craze for chinoiserie in 18th-century Europe, for example, brought Asian floral motifs (peonies, lotus scrolls, chrysanthemum patterns) into Western decorative arts. Conversely, late 19th-century European artists were deeply influenced by Japanese floral prints, a key example being Van Gogh’s own admiration of Japanese art. His painting “Almond Blossom” (1890) directly reflects that influence: Van Gogh borrowed the bold outlines and flat blue background from ukiyo-e woodcuts to depict an almond tree’s white blossoms against a spring sky. He created that painting as a gift for his newborn nephew, symbolizing new life and hope (almond trees bloom early, heralding spring).
In the 21st century, artists continue to revisit and expand the language of flowers. Contemporary works often explicitly invoke historical symbolism, while also infusing new meanings relevant to today’s world. Canadian artist Tony Robins’ series “Flowers of Resistance” (2025), an exhibition that directly mines the political and cultural meanings of flowers over time. Robins features paintings of flowers that various resistance movements have adopted as emblems, as far back as the 17th century and combines them with unexpected industrial materials for contrast. In one work, a delicately painted peacock flower is partially obscured by sheets of heavy steel. The peacock flower reference reaches back to a little-known 18th-century context, it was used as an abortifacient by enslaved women in the Caribbean as an act of bodily resistance. Robins overlays these images with modern elements to suggest how something as delicate as a flower can become a potent emblem of defiance when adopted by oppressed people. The juxtaposition adds material tactility and weight that relates to the brutality of regimes, highlighting the contrast between fragile blooms and the heavy forces they oppose. By examining such cases, Robins shows that the historic “floral language” in art is not dead, it is continually reinterpreted in contemporary visual discourse, whether to critique power structures or to celebrate hope.
Ai Weiwei employed real flowers as a tool of dissent in his personal activism. From 2013 to 2015, while he was under house arrest and barred from leaving China, Ai undertook a performance-protest called “With Flowers.” Every day, he placed a fresh bouquet of flowers in the basket of a bicycle outside his Beijing studio and photographed it. He vowed to do so until his confiscated passport was returned. This simple, gentle act accumulated extraordinary weight over time: Ai kept it up for 600 days straight. The bicycle (symbolically stationary, like Ai himself) bloomed anew each morning with lilies, chrysanthemums, sunflowers, carnations, whatever was in season. Ai explained his rationale plainly: “flowers are the most common language. For one thing, they’re about life… I can buy a bunch of fresh flowers every day to remind everyone that loss of freedom happens”. The sight of the colourful bouquet against the grey gate became an online phenomenon as Ai shared photos on social media. It was an elegant gesture of hope and endurance. Each fresh bloom marked another day of unjust restriction, yet also a refusal to succumb. Observers noted that Ai’s daily offering was “part-protest, part-performance art”, an ephemeral sculpture of resilience. Fittingly, when the government did return his passport in 2015, Ai announced the end of the protest by posting a photo of a bouquet with the simple caption, “Today, I got my passport”.
Even the realm of large-scale public art has seen flowers used as powerful symbols in contemporary times. In 2014, an installation called “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red” at the Tower of London demonstrated how a national flower can serve as a collective memorial. This project, by artist Paul Cummins and designer Tom Piper, planted 888,246 red ceramic poppies in the Tower’s moat, each poppy representing one British or colonial soldier who died in World War I. Over four months, volunteers “planted” the ceramic blooms until a vast field of red surrounded the historic fortress, coinciding with the centenary of WWI’s outbreak. The visual impact was stunning and elegiac: the sea of poppies evoked both the blood of fallen soldiers and the tradition of the red remembrance poppy (a symbol in Britain of commemoration since WWI). More than five million people visited this public art installation, testifying to the enduring emotional resonance of a simple flower form. As a reviewer noted, it was a deliberately simple yet poignant idea, by 11 November (Armistice Day) the moat brimmed with red flowers, and then they were gone. This temporality highlighted the installation’s theme of loss and memory.
The use of flowers in art has created a robust, and long-lasting visual language that transcends genre and geography. A painting of flowers is rarely ever just about botany or decoration; it is often a descriptor of its time and maker, carrying echoes of religious devotion, vanitas warnings, courtly love, scholarly virtue, national identity, or personal emotion. Modern and contemporary creators have added new chapters, using flowers to grapple with issues of identity, memory, and social change. The legacy of this floral language is evident each time we stand before an artwork and sense that the roses or lotus within are “speaking” to us, if we only know how to listen. In an era of rapid change and image-saturation, this historic visual language of flowers remains a poignant constant, a reminder of art’s capacity to communicate layers of meaning. The rose and the plum blossom, the lily and the lotus, each in their own cultural context, continue to bloom across time, inviting us into a dialogue between beauty and symbolism that enriches our experience of art history.
CURRENT EXHIBITION
TONY ROBINS: FLOWERS OF RESISTANCE
Exhibition on through August 9th, 2025.
