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Plate 1 A tulip, a cup of petals on a straight stem with one long leaf

Tulip

A declaration of love is the tulip's meaning in nearly every flower dictionary, from Charlotte de La Tour's in 1819 on. Later English lists added colours: Kate Greenaway made the red tulip a declaration of love, the yellow "hopeless love", the variegated "beautiful eyes", and the tulip alone "fame".

The language of flowers. Also called red tulip, tulip meaning.

Meaning

La Tour's chapter on the tulip is headed Déclaration d'amour. On the banks of the Bosphorus, she writes, the tulip is the emblem of inconstancy, but also of the most violent love. The English version of her book explains the image: in the East a lover declares himself with a tulip because, like the flower, he has "a face all on fire and a heart reduced to a coal". The same book gives the tulip a second, unkinder reading: bright, elegant and scentless, it suits a woman whose only recommendation is her looks. Henrietta Dumont's Floral Offering (Philadelphia, 1851) and Sarah Josepha Hale's Flora's Interpreter (Boston, 1832), whose red tulip is "a native of Persia", both keep the declaration of love. Kate Greenaway's Language of Flowers (1884) sorts tulips by colour. The dictionaries are a finished fashion, not a living tradition.

Origin and history

The dictionaries placed the tulip in the East, and the story they told went with it. Richard Folkard's Plant Lore, Legends, and Lyrics (1884) derives the name, through the old French tulipan, from the Persian word for a turban. The English version of La Tour says the tulip came from Persia to the Levant and reached western Europe in the middle of the sixteenth century through Busbeck, "ambassador from the Emperor of Germany to the Porte". La Tour and Folkard both describe a Feast of Tulips held every spring in the Sultan's palace. La Tour's preface puts the tulip into her harem story: a tulip with a black heart and flaming petals tells the sultana that her wishes are understood and shared (see Red rose for how far that story can be trusted). Yet the English version's own introduction, listing what flowers mean in the East, says that tulips there stand for "the complaints of infidelity".

Where "fame" came from

Greenaway's "fame" was a borrowing. Brent Elliott, of the Royal Horticultural Society's Lindley Library, found that it had earlier been the meaning of the tulip tree, a different plant; he also found a late book giving the tulip "charity", which he puts down to someone misreading "turnip" in a handwritten list. A board game of the period, with its text in German, French and English, rendered the tulip as "Proudly despise the proud vain fool".

A tulip in a bouquet

Flowers could be read together. A coloured plate in Dumont's book shows a Daisy, a wallflower and a tulip, captioned "Your innocence and fidelity in misfortune have caused me to declare my love for you".

See also

Red rose, Daisy, Red rose, White rose, Yellow rose, Pink rose.

Sources

  1. Le Langage des fleurs (Charlotte de La Tour, 13th edition), Charlotte de La Tour, Le Langage des fleurs, treizième édition augmentée (Paris: Garnier frères, [1856]); first published 1819, Cornell University Library, via the Internet Archive, Tulipe; préface
  2. The Language of Flowers: The Floral Offering, by Henrietta Dumont, 1851, H. C. Peck & Theo. Bliss, Philadelphia (Project Gutenberg edition), Tulip chapter; plate
  3. Flora's Interpreter (Sarah Josepha Hale, 1832), Sarah Josepha Hale, Flora's Interpreter, or the American Book of Flowers and Sentiments (Boston: Marsh, Capen and Lyon, 1832), Boston Public Library, via the Internet Archive, Tulip, red
  4. Language of Flowers, illustrated by Kate Greenaway, 1884, George Routledge and Sons (Project Gutenberg edition), Tulip
  5. The Victorian Language of Flowers (Brent Elliott, 2013), Brent Elliott, "The Victorian language of flowers", Occasional Papers from the RHS Lindley Library 10: 3–94 (2013), Royal Horticultural Society, via the Internet Archive, pp. 41, 48
  6. Plant Lore, Legends, and Lyrics (Richard Folkard, 1884), Richard Folkard, Plant Lore, Legends, and Lyrics (London: Sampson Low, 1884), Project Gutenberg, Tulip
  7. The Language of Flowers, with Illustrative Poetry, by Frederic Shoberl, seventh edition, 1840, Saunders & Otley, London (Internet Archive, Cornell University Library copy), Tulip; Introduction

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Last reviewed September 29, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research

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