The Language of Herbs

Send rosemary for remembrance. Fold lavender into a letter that still holds its scent a year on. Tuck yarrow into a wedding bouquet for the seven years of love the old charm promised. Herbs speak a language older and plainer than flowers. Where a rose means love for how it looks, rosemary means remembrance for what it did: packed between linen, laid on coffins, carried by mourners. The Language of Herbs is a working dictionary of around fifty plants and the meanings they earned over centuries of handling in the sickroom, the kitchen, the doorway and the churchyard. Every entry sets out the plant's folklore, its myth, its old use in the home, and what it communicates when sent or gifted. Wherever a meaning is contested or merely a modern invention, the entry names its source and says so, tracing the language from Pliny and Dioscorides through Culpeper to the Victorian flower dictionaries that fixed it in print. Read it cover to cover for the history of floriography and the language of flowers, or open it at a single herb and build a message of your own. Meticulously sourced and quietly enchanted, a field guide to a vocabulary written in leaves.