Red rose

The Turkish story and its doubters

La Tour told her readers that the language came from the harems of the East. Her preface imagines a sultana dropping a spray of lily of the valley for a young page, and a rose sent back to say that reason stands in the way; a Tulip with a black heart and flaming petals says her wishes are shared. Her dictionary's title page offers help to "write a note or compose a sélam".

Her evidence was a letter Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote in Turkey, from Pera, on 16 March 1718; her letters were published after her death, in 1763. Montagu sent a friend "a Turkish love-letter" in a little box: a purse of small things, among them a pearl, a clove, soap, coal, a rose and pepper, each standing for a line of verse that rhymed with its Turkish name. Soap said "I am sick with love"; pepper, "Send me an answer". The rose, gul, called up "May you be pleased, and your sorrows mine!" Another line in the same letter reads "You are an unblown rose!" "There is no colour, no flower, no weed, no fruit, herb, pebble, or feather, that has not a verse belonging to it," Montagu wrote.

Scholars now doubt that this was a language of flowers at all. Elliott points out that Montagu's code used objects of every kind, and that the objects had no meanings of their own: they were reminders of rhyming verses. The orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, who had first visited Istanbul in 1799, published an article in 1809 attacking the exaggerations of Montagu's letter. His list of rhymes gives the rose two different verses, "My torments have reduced me to ashes" and "I weep; you, laugh". The English version of La Tour itself explains that a flower's message came from the word its name rhymed with, and cites von Hammer, but it still credits Montagu and La Motraie, "the companion of Charles XII", with making the language famous in Europe, and says a message bouquet is called in the East "a Salaam (salutation)". Phillips, in England, rejected the Turkish story outright. The French word sélam, used for such a bouquet, is according to Elliott a corruption of the Arabic greeting salaam, and he knows of no evidence that it was ever used in Turkey for the rhyming code. Cornell University Library's exhibition on the subject concludes that a European origin, in the romantic bouquets of France, is more likely.

Red and white together

The French poet Bonnefons, La Tour writes, sent the woman he loved two roses, a white one for his pallor and a bright red one for the fire in his heart. So a red and a white rose together meant "sufferings of love", or "fire of the heart", in her dictionary. Greenaway, sixty years later, made the pair mean "unity". Richard Folkard's Plant Lore, Legends, and Lyrics (1884) records that in antiquity brides and bridegrooms were crowned with chaplets of red and white roses. The white rose has its own page.

The rose before the dictionaries

Elizabeth Haig's study of flowers in religious painting (1913) describes the rose among the Romans as a sign of victory and of triumphant love, and as the flower of Venus. The Church at first made it the flower of martyrdom, then allowed it to remain a symbol of love, of divine love. Dumont repeats the classical story of its colour: Venus, running to help Adonis, tore her foot on a thorn, and her blood turned a white rose red.