A contemplative journey through the gardens, meadows, and ancient groves that have shaped our deepest expressions of maternal love
When the Garden Speaks
There are mornings in early May when the garden seems to hold its breath. The tulips are beginning to soften at the lip, their petals loosening from the tight geometry of April into something altogether more generous, more open. The lilac has arrived in that fleeting, almost painful abundance it permits us only once a year. The cow parsley foams along the lane. And everywhere, in the borders and the hedgerows, in the pots beside the kitchen door and the wild corners where no hand reaches, something is happening that has always happened, that the human heart has always recognised without quite being able to name.
This is the season of mothers. Not merely as a date inscribed on a calendar — though the second Sunday of May carries its weight in our culture — but as something older and more instinctual: a stirring in the earth that corresponds to something in us, a greening of the world that we have always associated with the fundamental act of giving life, sustaining it, protecting it through difficult seasons. Long before the florist’s buckets were filled with pink carnations and wrapped in cellophane, long before greeting cards and restaurant bookings, human beings were placing flowers in the hands of the women who had borne them. They were weaving garlands for the great mother goddesses. They were planting particular herbs in particular corners of the garden because those herbs spoke of something that language, at its most direct, could not quite reach.
The symbolism of Mother’s Day — and the far older tradition of honouring motherhood through the natural world — is one of the richest and most layered in all of florography, the language of flowers. It draws on mythology and folk medicine, on religious iconography and agricultural custom, on the private language of cottage gardens and the grand gestures of formal horticulture. It reaches back to Persia and ancient Greece, to the fertility cults of the Near East and the flower-strewn temples of Rome, and it reaches forward into our own gardens, our own kitchen tables, our own impulse to cut an armful of something beautiful and carry it to someone we love.
This guide is an attempt to honour that depth. It is not a shopping list, though you may find within it much to guide your choices at the florist or in your own cutting garden. It is rather an exploration: of the flowers and plants that have come to stand for maternal love and its many qualities — its tenderness and its endurance, its fertility and its grief, its wildness and its cultivation. It is an exploration of why certain blossoms move us in the way they do, of the long human story that has gathered around roses and carnations, around apple blossom and lily of the valley, around the humble daisy and the magnificent peony.
Read it as you might walk through a well-loved garden: slowly, with attention, pausing where something catches the light.
Part One: The Ancient Roots — Goddesses, Gardens, and the Great Mother
The Earliest Offerings
To understand why we give flowers to our mothers, we must first understand why human beings began giving flowers to anyone at all. The impulse is ancient — far older than writing, far older than organised religion as we recognise it. Archaeological evidence suggests that our earliest ancestors were placing flowers in graves at least sixty thousand years ago. The Shanidar Cave in Iraq, excavated in the 1950s and 1960s, yielded pollen from several flowering species — ragwort, groundsel, grape hyacinth, hollyhock — clustered around a Neanderthal burial in a pattern that strongly suggests deliberate placement. Whether this represents reverence, grief, or some instinct we no longer have a name for, it tells us something profound: that from the earliest moments of human consciousness, flowers have been the medium through which we reach toward what cannot be spoken.
The great mother goddesses — those vast, ancient deities who preceded the more familiar pantheons of Greece and Rome — were almost always associated with the flowering earth. Cybele, the Phrygian Great Mother whose cult spread across the ancient world, was worshipped with offerings of flowers and evergreen boughs. Her priests wore garlands; her temples were decorated with wreaths. In the spring festival held in her honour, devotees processed through city streets carrying armfuls of spring flowers, and the air was thick with the scent of violets and narcissi. The connection between the mother goddess and the flowering world was not symbolic in any abstract sense — it was literal. She was the earth. The flowers were her body.
Isis, the great Egyptian mother goddess, was associated with the lotus and with various aromatic herbs. Her temples were fragrant with incense made from flowering plants, and worshippers brought her offerings of flowers as they would bring gifts to any living person they wished to honour. The lotus held particular significance: it closed at night and opened each morning, a cycle that spoke of rebirth and regeneration — qualities inherently maternal in Egyptian cosmology.
Demeter, the Greek goddess of the harvest and agriculture, is the figure whose mythology speaks most directly to the experience of motherhood. The story of her daughter Persephone’s abduction by Hades, and Demeter’s long grief, is one of the most beautiful and terrible stories in all of mythology, and it is essentially a story about what it means to be a mother. When Persephone was taken, Demeter’s grief was so absolute that the earth became barren. Nothing flowered. Nothing fruited. The meadows that had been bright with wildflowers turned grey and silent. It was only when Persephone was at last returned to her mother, at least for part of the year, that Demeter’s joy allowed spring to return to the world.
This myth is not simply a story about seasons, though it explains them. It is a story about the way a mother’s emotional state is inseparable from the fertility of the world around her. It is a story about the power of maternal love to sustain or to withhold. And it established, in the Greek and Roman imagination, a set of associations between motherhood and the flowering earth that have never entirely faded. When we bring our mothers flowers in spring, we are in some dim, inherited way still celebrating the return of Persephone and the end of Demeter’s winter grief.
The Romans celebrated Mothering Sunday — or rather, its precursor — in the form of a festival called Hilaria, held in honour of Cybele on the fourth Sunday of Lent. This is one of the clearest historical threads connecting ancient goddess worship to the Christian and then secular celebration we know today. The festival involved, among other things, the giving of offerings and the wearing of garlands, and it was a day when the usual hierarchies were suspended in a spirit of joyful celebration.
The Christian Transformation: Simnel Cakes and Laetare Sunday
The transition from pagan goddess worship to Christian observance was, in England, accomplished with the characteristic pragmatic genius of a culture that preferred to absorb and transform rather than simply to erase. The fourth Sunday of Lent became known as Mothering Sunday — a day when the faithful were encouraged to return to their “mother church,” the cathedral or main church of their diocese, for a special service. This is the immediate ancestor of the Mother’s Day we observe today, and understanding it illuminates some of the symbolism that still surrounds the day.
The occasion was also, in domestic practice, a day when servants and apprentices were given leave to return home to their own families. They would walk through the lanes in early spring, and the custom of gathering wildflowers on the way — violets and primroses, early daffodils, whatever the hedgerows offered — became so established that the day was sometimes called Refreshment Sunday, a day of release from the austerities of Lent. The flowers gathered were brought home to mothers, a practice that gave the day much of its flavour.
The simnel cake — that dense, rich fruit cake with its layer of marzipan and its eleven apostles rendered in icing — was the traditional baked offering of the day. Its sweetness, its labour, its symbolic weight, made it an appropriate gift for a mother who had kept the household together through the lean weeks of Lent. But it was the wildflowers gathered along the way that gave the day its particular sensory signature: the cold, sweet scent of violets; the pale, nodding faces of wood anemones; the sulphurous yellow of primroses in the damp lanes.
These were not chosen for their beauty alone, though beauty was part of it. They were chosen because they were what the season offered, and because what the season offered in early spring — tentative, delicate, hopeful flowers pushing through cold soil — spoke with uncanny precision to the quality of maternal love as human beings have always experienced it: something that persists through difficulty, that offers itself freely, that has a kind of radical, unconditional tenderness.
Part Two: The Carnation — A Flower of Extraordinary Complexity
The Origin of a Tradition
Of all the flowers associated with Mother’s Day in the modern era, the carnation has the strongest and most specific claim. Its elevation to the status of Mother’s Day flower is usually attributed to Anna Jarvis, the American woman who campaigned tirelessly in the early twentieth century to establish an official Mother’s Day in the United States. When the day was finally proclaimed by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914, designating the second Sunday of May as Mother’s Day, Jarvis had already determined that the white carnation would be its symbol.
Her reasons were personal and botanical in equal measure. Her own mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, had favoured white carnations, and at the memorial service Anna organised for her in 1908 — widely considered the first modern Mother’s Day celebration — she distributed five hundred white carnations to the congregation. But the choice was also informed by a more considered reading of what the carnation represented.
Anna Jarvis believed that the white carnation embodied the characteristics of a good mother: its whiteness spoke of purity; its form — the ruffled, complex, layered arrangement of petals — suggested the richness and depth of maternal love; its fragrance was sweet but not cloying, present without being overwhelming; and, practically speaking, it was a flower that held up well when worn as a buttonhole, which was the form in which Jarvis intended it to be used. She envisioned everyone on Mother’s Day wearing a carnation: white if their mother had died, coloured if she was still living.
The distinction between white and coloured carnations became a kind of nationwide code in the United States during the early decades of the twentieth century. Department stores sold out of carnations; florists struggled to keep up with demand. The flower became so thoroughly identified with the day that in some parts of America, Mother’s Day was simply called Carnation Day.
The Deeper History of Dianthus
The carnation — Dianthus caryophyllus in its cultivated form, though the genus Dianthus encompasses many hundreds of species including the beloved pinks and sweet Williams — has one of the richest histories of any flower in cultivation. Its very name carries mythology: Dianthus means “flower of the gods” in Greek, from dios (divine) and anthos (flower). The specific association with divine parenthood is established from the beginning.
The carnation has been cultivated for at least two thousand years, and possibly much longer. Its native range is unclear, partly because it has been grown in gardens for so long that distinguishing wild populations from escaped cultivars is difficult. The Romans grew it extensively; there are references to Dianthus in Roman poetry, and excavations at Pompeii have revealed charred remains that include what appear to be carnation petals. In medieval Europe, the carnation — then usually called the gillyflower or clove pink, for its intense, spice-like scent — was one of the most important garden flowers. Monastery gardens cultivated it for medicinal purposes (it was used in cordials and tonics), for culinary flavouring, and for its beauty.
The association with the divine and with love runs throughout the carnation’s cultural history. In Christian iconography, the pink carnation was associated with the tears of the Virgin Mary, shed at the Crucifixion. According to one version of this legend, carnations sprang up wherever Mary’s tears fell as she wept along the Via Dolorosa. This connection between the carnation and maternal grief — specifically the grief of the mother who must witness her child’s suffering — gave the flower an emotional depth that went beyond simple beauty or even simple love. The carnation, in this tradition, carries both love and sorrow: the full weight of what it means to be a mother.
This iconographic tradition is richly represented in Renaissance painting. The Madonna and Child with carnations is one of the most common subjects in Italian religious art of the fifteenth century. Leonardo da Vinci painted it; Raphael explored it repeatedly; Dürer’s early work includes a famous example in which the Christ child reaches for a carnation held by his mother with an expression of tender curiosity. The choice of the carnation in these works was not arbitrary or merely decorative. It was laden with meaning: the flower that Mary held out to her son was a kind of prophecy, a prefiguration of his passion. The carnation spoke simultaneously of love and of the suffering that love entails.
The Scent of Cloves and Memory
One of the reasons the carnation endures as a symbol of maternal association is its scent, which is among the most distinctive and memorable of any garden flower. The warm, spice-like fragrance — genuinely reminiscent of cloves, hence the old name “clove pink” — has a quality that triggers memory with unusual precision. Scent is the sense most directly connected to memory and emotion in human neuroscience, processed through the olfactory bulb which has direct connections to the hippocampus and amygdala, the brain structures associated with memory and emotional response. Many people who did not grow up in the American tradition of carnations on Mother’s Day nevertheless find the scent of carnations — encountered in a florist’s shop, in an old garden, in the perfume of someone who wore it — freighted with a particular kind of tender association.
The old-fashioned pinks — closer in form and scent to the wild ancestor than the modern, large-flowered florist’s carnation — have retained this quality more intensely. A well-grown Dianthus ‘Mrs Sinkins’, the Victorian double pink with its fringed white petals and its extraordinary fragrance, carries in its scent the entire history of cottage gardens: grandmother’s borders, Sunday afternoons, the particular peace of an ordered garden in high summer. It is a flower that makes the past suddenly present, which is, in another sense, what thinking about our mothers always does.
Colour and Its Meanings
The carnation’s wide colour range — it comes in white, cream, every shade of pink from the palest blush to magenta, red, purple, yellow, and through breeding, combinations of all these — has allowed it to carry a particularly refined vocabulary of sentiment. Within the Mother’s Day tradition:
White carnations, as Jarvis established, represent pure love, innocence, and remembrance of mothers who have died. Their whiteness has also been associated with the kind of selfless, unconditional love that typifies the maternal ideal: love that does not ask for anything in return, that gives itself wholly.
Pink carnations, particularly the soft, warm pinks, are associated with gratitude, admiration, and the love of a living mother. There is something in the pinkness of a carnation — that particular warm, blush shade — that speaks of tenderness and approachability, of love that is both profound and comfortable.
Red carnations carry a different weight: passion, depth of feeling, admiration that rises to something close to awe. In the Mother’s Day vocabulary, red carnations are often given by adult children who wish to express not just affection but profound respect — a recognition of the mother as a woman of extraordinary quality.
Part Three: The Rose — Queen of the Garden, Queen of Love
An Ancient Conversation
The rose needs no introduction, and yet it continually surprises. Of all the flowers that have gathered symbolic meaning around them over the millennia, the rose is the most complex, the most contradictory, and in many ways the most inexhaustible. It stands for love, for secrecy, for beauty, for transience, for spiritual aspiration, for earthly pleasure. It is the flower of Venus and of the Virgin Mary; of Aphrodite and of the English throne; of romantics and revolutionaries. It is, in the garden, at once the most cultivated and the most wild.
In the context of Mother’s Day and maternal symbolism, the rose has an equally layered significance. It is, most simply, the flower of love — and maternal love is the love that precedes and in some sense underlies all others. But the rose’s associations with motherhood run deeper than that. In Christian tradition, Mary is the Rosa Mystica, the Mystical Rose — an identification that goes back at least to the medieval period and continues in Catholic devotion to this day. The garden enclosed, the hortus conclusus, in which the Virgin is so often depicted in Gothic and Renaissance painting, is a rose garden: a place of perfected beauty, protected and tended, in which the most sacred form of maternal love is represented.
The connection between roses and the mother goddess is even older. Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, was associated with roses, and since Aphrodite was in some traditions identified with earlier mother goddess figures — Astarte, Ishtar, Inanna — the rose carries maternal associations that predate Christianity by many centuries. In Roman mythology, the rose was created by Venus specifically as an expression of love, and its thorns were said to have drawn her blood, giving it its characteristic red colour. This story — of a goddess wounded by love, her blood feeding the beauty of the flower — is a version, in miniature, of the deeper story the carnation tells through the tears of Mary. Love and sacrifice, beauty and pain, are inseparable in the rose as they are inseparable in the experience of motherhood.
The Garden Rose in Full
To understand the rose as a symbol, it helps to stand in front of a rose in full flower. Not a hybrid tea in a florist’s bucket, though that too has its beauty, but a shrub rose at its peak in early summer: a Rosa ‘Gertrude Jekyll’, say, with its deep pink, many-petalled flowers and its rich, true fragrance; or a Gallica rose, darkly crimson, with the scent that Rose Gallica — Rosa gallica — has been carrying since the ancient world.
There is something about the form of a full-blown rose that speaks directly to the experience of abundance, of something that gives itself entirely, that holds nothing back. The petals are arranged in a spiral, working outward from the tight centre in an expanding, generous arc. There are often fifty, eighty, a hundred petals in a fully double rose, each one individually shaped, adding its own curve and colour to the whole. The effect — and this is not merely poetic — is of something that has expanded to its fullest possible extent, that has realised every potentiality it contained, that is offering everything it has.
This quality — of complete, unconditional giving — is at the heart of why the rose speaks so powerfully of maternal love. A mother, at her fullest, is something like a rose in bloom: having given of herself entirely, she achieves a kind of completeness that is also an offering.
Roses for Mothers: Choosing Well
For Mother’s Day, the choice of rose rewards careful thought. The hybrid teas and floribundas that dominate the cut flower trade are reliable and beautiful, but for a gift that carries greater depth and character, the old roses and English roses offer something more complex.
Rosa ‘Félicité-Perpétue’, a vigorous climber with small, blush-white rosette flowers and a light primrose fragrance, has the quality of accumulated time — it has been grown in gardens since 1827, and it carries that history with it. To give someone a rose of this age and refinement is to place them within a long human tradition of appreciation.
Rosa ‘Madame Isaac Péreire’, a Bourbon rose with extravagantly large, cupped, magenta-pink flowers and one of the most powerful fragrances in the entire rose family, makes no apology for its abundance. It is a rose for giving to someone you love without reservation.
The pale apricot-pink of ‘Buff Beauty’, a Hybrid Musk rose that flowers in loose clusters with a rich, warm fragrance, has an entirely different character: softer, more restrained, more evocative of comfort and reliability.
For gardens rather than cut flowers, the species roses — Rosa glauca with its glaucous purple-blue foliage; Rosa moyesii with its blood-red flowers and magnificent hips; the eglantine rose, Rosa rubiginosa, with its apple-scented leaves — offer a wilder kind of beauty, one that connects more directly to the hedgerow tradition of Mothering Sunday, the flowers gathered along the lane.
Part Four: The Lily — Purity, Majesty, and the Madonna’s Flower
The White Lily and Its Meanings
No flower has a more sustained and specifically maternal iconography than the white lily — Lilium candidum, the Madonna Lily — which has been associated with the Virgin Mary and with feminine purity for at least two thousand years. In Christian art, the Madonna Lily appears so frequently in depictions of the Annunciation that it has become almost synonymous with that moment: the archangel Gabriel arriving to tell Mary of her divine pregnancy, often carrying a stem of white lilies as the embodiment of heavenly purity and the promise of new life.
The association between the lily and feminine purity is, like most such associations, both ancient and not entirely simple. In pre-Christian tradition, Lilium candidum was associated with Hera, the queen of the Greek gods, and with maternal abundance: it was said to have sprung from the milk that fell from Hera’s breast when the infant Heracles drank too greedily. This myth — of a goddess’s milk becoming flowers — is an extraordinarily rich image, connecting the white lily directly to the bodily act of mothering, to the nourishing gift that is both intimate and inexhaustible.
The Romans associated the lily with Juno, the queen of heaven and the goddess of marriage and childbirth — a connection that continued, transformed, into the Christian identification with Mary. The lily is, in this long tradition, not merely a flower of abstract purity but of specifically maternal purity: the purity of the woman who gives life, who nourishes, who protects.
The Scent as Symbol
Lilium candidum is one of the most powerfully fragrant flowers in cultivation, and its fragrance — heavy, sweet, unmistakable, with something almost narcotic about it in large quantities — is an important part of its symbolic character. The scent of white lilies is associated, in many cultures, with both life and death: they are used at weddings and at funerals, at celebrations of new life and in rooms of mourning. This duality is appropriate to their symbolic weight. Maternal love is itself this kind of double thing: it brings life into the world, and it must also let go, must endure loss, must survive grief.
In Victorian flower language — the elaborate codified system of floriography that flourished in the nineteenth century — the white lily meant purity and majesty in most interpretations, though some sources give it the specific meaning of “it is heavenly to be loved by you.” The tiger lily, Lilium lancifolium, with its spotted orange and black flowers, was given a quite different meaning: pride, sometimes even danger. The lily of the valley — Convallaria majalis, botanically unrelated to the true lilies — was interpreted as pure happiness, the return of joy. This last is peculiarly apt as a flower for a day that celebrates the return of a mother’s presence, in the tradition of Mothering Sunday, to a household that has been doing without.
Oriental Lilies and Contemporary Gardens
The great Oriental hybrid lilies — those magnificent, broad-petalled, intensely fragrant flowers that fill the late summer border — carry something of the Madonna Lily’s symbolic weight in their whiteness and their fragrance, even without the specific iconographic history. ‘Casa Blanca’, pure white with stamens tipped in terracotta; ‘Stargazer’, deep crimson with white edges and a fragrance that travels across the garden; ‘Black Beauty’, dark crimson with reflexed petals — these are flowers of theatrical presence and extraordinary sensory intensity.
For Mother’s Day gardens, lilies make magnificent statement plants, rising through lower perennials to add height and drama and that incomparable fragrance in high summer. They do well in pots, which makes them more manageable if the garden soil is heavy or poorly drained. Planted now — in spring, before the day itself — they will flower in July, a sustained gift that continues to give long after the day has passed.
Part Five: Lily of the Valley — Innocence, Return, and May’s Own Flower
The Flower of May
Convallaria majalis — lily of the valley — is in some ways the most perfectly attuned of all flowers to the spirit of Mothering Sunday. It flowers in May, which is to say it flowers in the very month the day is now observed. Its common name makes a direct reference to the valley — to enclosed, sheltered places, to the protected spaces in which life is nurtured. Its flowers are among the most delicate and intricate of any British native plant: tiny white bells, perfectly formed, hanging in a row from an arching stem, with a fragrance that is at once light and powerful, clean and sweet, simple and complex.
In the language of flowers, lily of the valley signifies the return of happiness. The derivation of this meaning is partly botanical — the plant flowers after the darkness and cold of winter, representing the return of warmth and light — and partly mythological. One Christian legend associates it with the tears of the Virgin Mary shed at the Crucifixion, which fell to the earth and became lily of the valley. In this tradition, it shares the carnation’s association with maternal grief transformed into beauty — tears becoming flowers, sorrow becoming something lovely and fragrant and alive.
Another legend connects it with St Leonard, who fought a great dragon in a forest in Sussex, and wherever his blood fell, lily of the valley grew. This story may seem unrelated to maternal symbolism, but forests in which holy flowers grow spontaneously from the ground speak of the same ancient association between the earth itself — the great mother — and the flowers that spring from it.
In French Culture: Le Muguet
In France, the first of May — la Fête du Muguet — is lily of the valley day, and it is one of the most charming and deeply embedded of all French floral traditions. On the first of May, vendors on street corners throughout Paris and every French town sell sprigs of muguet — lily of the valley — and it is traditional to give a sprig to someone you love as a token of luck and affection. The association with May Day is old, connected to both the ancient celebration of spring and to the later association with labour movements and working-class solidarity. That such a delicate and aristocratic-looking flower should have become the symbol of working-class solidarity is one of those beautiful contradictions that culture occasionally produces, and it has given the lily of the valley a democratising quality: it belongs to everyone.
The tradition of presenting lily of the valley to a loved one on the first of May overlaps naturally with the tradition of honouring mothers in May, and in many French families the two are merged: muguet is given both as a May Day token and as a gesture of affection toward mothers and grandmothers. The flower’s fragrance — which, extracted, forms the basis of some of the most celebrated perfumes in history, including Dior’s ‘Diorissimo’ — fills florists’ shops throughout April and May, a seasonal signifier as reliable as any on the horticultural calendar.
Growing Convallaria
Lily of the valley is a plant that rewards patience. It is slow to establish, and it does not always perform well in its first year in a new position. But once settled — in the dappled shade it prefers, in reasonably moist, humus-rich soil — it spreads steadily and eventually forms impressive carpets of flower in late spring. The sight of an established drift of Convallaria in full flower, hundreds of stems each carrying their row of white bells, the fragrance rising in the cool morning air, is one of the most beautiful things a garden can offer.
It is a plant with strong associations with old gardens, with places that have been tended by many hands over many years. To find it growing in a new house’s garden is often a sign that the space has been loved for a long time, that other gardeners have passed through and left something behind. This quality — of accumulated care, of love that has been passed on — gives it a particular appropriateness as a plant associated with maternal inheritance.
Part Six: Apple Blossom — Fruitfulness, Spring, and the Orchard
The Tree in Flower
Few images in the natural world speak more directly to the conjunction of beauty and fruitfulness than an apple tree in flower. In early spring, the trees are transformed: the bare grey branches that have endured the winter suddenly reveal themselves as the armatures of something extraordinary, carrying millions of tight pink-and-white buds that open into flowers of extraordinary delicacy and sweetness. The petals are white, flushed with the palest pink on the outside, and they carry a fragrance that combines the sweetness of honey with something sharp and clean, the scent of new growth.
Apple blossom has been a symbol of maternal love and fertility across many cultures for thousands of years. The apple tree as a whole — generous, long-lived, productive, capable of offering shade and beauty as well as nourishment — has been associated with maternal qualities in virtually every tradition that has encountered it. Celtic mythology regarded the apple as a sacred fruit of the Otherworld, associated with goddesses and with eternal life. The island of Avalon — the paradise to which the mortally wounded Arthur is taken — takes its name from the Celtic word for apple; it is, in one tradition, an island of apple trees tended by nine enchantresses, a feminine paradise.
In Norse mythology, the goddess Idunn kept the golden apples of immortality, giving them to the gods to maintain their eternal youth. Idunn is in some senses a maternal figure — she nourishes the gods, keeps them vital, tends the orchard that is essential to their continued existence. When she is stolen away, the gods begin to age and weaken; her return restores their vitality. The parallel with Demeter’s myth is striking, and both point to the same deep association between a female divine figure, the management of an orchard or garden, and the sustenance of those in her care.
The Language of the Orchard
An orchard, as a cultivated space, has always had associations with the carefully tended abundance that is one aspect of maternal love. Unlike the wilderness, which is vast and indifferent, an orchard has been selected, planted, pruned, and maintained by human hands. Its abundance is a product of sustained care over years, often decades. An apple tree properly managed and fed will produce fruit for a century or more; there are orchards in England containing trees that were planted in the Victorian era, still flowering, still fruiting, still giving. This quality of sustained, patient, generative care is one of the defining qualities of maternal love as it has been experienced and expressed across cultures.
Apple blossom as a cut flower is underused, perhaps because it is unfamiliar. The branches cut in early spring, placed in deep water, will open and fill a room with their fragrance. They are incomparably beautiful — each spray a complex arrangement of buds and half-opened flowers and newly minted leaves — and they have a character that no florist’s flower can quite match: the character of the tree itself, of its long history, its winters endured, its springs anticipated.
For a Mother’s Day gift from a garden, apple blossom cut with care and arranged with its own leaves is one of the most beautiful and personally expressive things one can offer. It says: I went into the garden for you. I brought you the season itself.
Part Seven: The Peony — Abundance, Healing, and the Matriarch
A Flower of Ancient Lineage
The peony — Paeonia in its many species and countless cultivars — is one of the great flowers of the garden, and it has been one of the great flowers of human culture for longer than almost any other plant in cultivation. In China, peonies have been cultivated for at least two thousand years, and in Chinese culture they hold a status equivalent to the rose in the West: they are the flower of prosperity, of good fortune, of feminine beauty and maternal abundance. The tree peony, Paeonia suffruticosa, was known as the King of Flowers in Chinese tradition; the herbaceous peony, Paeonia lactiflora, as the Prime Minister of Flowers. Both were grown in imperial gardens, painted by the greatest artists, celebrated in poetry, and given as gifts of supreme distinction.
The association between peonies and maternal qualities in Chinese culture is explicit and long-established. The peony represents the kind of abundance that a mother’s love provides: lavish, unhesitating, inexhaustible. The flower’s form — those great, globe-shaped, many-petalled heads that seem almost too large for their stems, that nod and tremble in the breeze with the weight of their own beauty — speaks of a generosity that cannot be contained, of an excess of good things spilling over.
In Greek mythology, the peony has a different but equally resonant story. Its name comes from Paeon, the physician of the gods, who used a plant given to him by the mother of Apollo — Leto — to heal Hades after Heracles wounded him. When Zeus transformed Paeon into a flower to save him from Asclepius’s jealousy, the flower that bore his name retained its association with healing. The peony has been used in medicine in many traditions, and this medicinal quality — of a plant that heals, that restores, that makes whole again — is itself a quality we associate with maternal care.
The English Peony Border
In the English garden, peonies have a particular place in the early summer border, flowering in late May and June in a brief, glorious explosion that feels exactly right for a flower so associated with celebration and abundance. The sight of a well-established peony clump in full flower — and a clump may take several years to reach its full potential, growing more magnificent with each passing year — is one of the most exhilarating things the early summer garden can offer.
Paeonia lactiflora ‘Sarah Bernhardt’ remains, despite over a century of competition from newer cultivars, one of the most popular peonies in cultivation: its flowers are apple-blossom pink, fully double, sweetly scented, produced in generous quantities on strong stems. Named for the French actress at the height of her fame, it has the theatrical, larger-than-life quality that the best peonies embody.
Paeonia lactiflora ‘Festiva Maxima’, white with crimson flecks at the centre, is even older and equally magnificent. Its fragrance is more intense than ‘Sarah Bernhardt’, carrying across the garden on warm evenings. For pure white, ‘Duchesse de Nemours’ is incomparable: fully double, creamy white, with a sweetness that fills the garden.
The peonies that work particularly well as cut flowers are those with strong stems — ‘Karl Rosenfield’, deep crimson, holds its head up well; ‘Bowl of Beauty’, with its pink outer petals and cream petaloids at the centre, has a form that seems designed to be admired from every angle.
The Gift of a Peony Plant
For a Mother’s Day gift, a peony plant in bud — or a young plant to be grown on — is one of the most enduring and generous things one can give. Unlike cut flowers, which are beautiful for days, a peony plant given with care will reward the recipient for decades. The gift has a different quality from cut flowers: it is a gift of time, of accumulated future pleasure. Every May for the next thirty years, the plant will flower, and those flowers will be a renewed gift. The giver’s thought will be remembered every time the flowers open.
This quality of a gift that gives again and again — that plants itself in the fabric of a person’s garden and their future life — is itself a kind of maternal quality. It is an expression of love that thinks beyond the immediate moment, that provides for the future, that roots itself in the long term.
Part Eight: The Daisy — Simplicity, Innocence, and the Child’s Flower
The Flower of the Meadow
The daisy — Bellis perennis, the common lawn daisy of European meadows and gardens — is among the most universally recognisable and most deeply loved of all wildflowers. It grows everywhere: in lawns and verges, in churchyards and meadows, in every crack and corner where the soil is poor enough that competition from more vigorous plants gives it a chance. Its flowers are the very model of simplicity: a golden disc at the centre, surrounded by white petals — rays, strictly speaking — that fold themselves down at night and in cold weather and open with the sun.
The daisy is the first flower many children learn to name, and this early encounter gives it a particular place in the symbolic vocabulary of childhood and of the relationship between child and mother. The daisy chain — that patient, intricate, slightly maddening construction of linked flowers through which each stem is threaded through a slit in the next — is perhaps the most universal of all children’s crafts, practised across cultures and centuries. To make a daisy chain for someone is to offer them something made entirely of time and attention: no skill is required beyond patience, and the result is a garland as fragile as the day itself.
This association with childhood innocence and with the gifts a child can give to a mother — uncomplicated, freely offered, made from whatever the world provides — gives the daisy a particular poignancy in the context of Mother’s Day. The most elaborate and expensive bouquet of hothouse flowers cannot carry quite the quality of a handful of daisies gathered from the lawn by a small child and presented without wrapping or ceremony, with complete sincerity. In its simplicity, the daisy speaks of the purest form of the love that Mother’s Day is meant to honour: the love of a child for the person who made the world for them.
Daisy Symbolism Across Cultures
In the language of flowers, the daisy signifies innocence and loyal love. The Old English name was “day’s eye” — dæges ēage — from the way the flower opens and closes with the light, which is why it was associated with the eye of the day, watching, attentive, constant. This quality of constant attention — of an eye that follows the light, that opens every morning without fail — is itself a maternal quality, and the daisy’s persistence, its cheerful willingness to grow everywhere, its ability to recover from being walked on and mown, makes it a symbol of the kind of love that endures everything without complaint.
In Norse mythology, the daisy was Freya’s sacred flower, and Freya was the goddess of love, fertility, and motherhood. In this tradition, the daisy was sacred to mothers and new children: it was hung in birthing rooms and placed in the cradles of newborns. The association between the daisy and the beginning of life, with the moment a new person enters the world and a woman becomes a mother for the first time, gives it a special resonance.
The Marguerite daisy — Argyranthemum frutescens — a shrubby plant from the Canary Islands with larger, more refined flowers than the common lawn daisy, became a popular Victorian garden plant and maintains a devoted following. Its flowers, in white, pink, and yellow, have a freshness and cheerfulness that makes them ideal for the kind of informal, relaxed planting that Mother’s Day, at its best, embodies: not formal, not grand, but generous and genuine.
Part Nine: Lavender — Memory, Devotion, and the Household Herb
The Herb of Remembrance
Lavender — Lavandula angustifolia and its many relatives and cultivars — occupies a unique position in the symbolic vocabulary of maternal love, not as a flower of grand gesture or mythological resonance, but as the herb of daily life, of household care, of the steady work of tending a home and the people within it. Its associations are domestic in the deepest and most dignified sense: it belongs to the linen cupboard, to the soap-making, to the kitchen garden, to the things that women have done for their families for centuries as acts of care so habitual they barely notice them.
Lavender has been used to scent and preserve linens since at least the Roman period — the name may derive from the Latin lavare, to wash, though this etymology is debated. Roman baths were scented with lavender, and the plant was known for its clean, purifying scent. Through the medieval period and into the early modern era, lavender was one of the most important herbs in the household garden: it was used in sachets to protect stored linens from moths, in strewing herbs spread on floors to freshen the air, in herbal medicines, in culinary preparations, and simply to fill the garden with fragrance on warm summer afternoons.
The association between lavender and domestic care — with the particular, tender, practical love that expresses itself in clean sheets and a well-ordered house, in the careful preservation of what is valued against the depredations of time — gives it a symbolism different from, but complementary to, the grand gestures of roses and lilies. Lavender speaks of love in its everyday form: not love as a dramatic experience, but love as a practice, as a series of small acts done consistently over a lifetime.
Lavender in Memory
Lavender is also, powerfully, a herb of memory. Its scent is one of those that preserves experiences with unusual fidelity; encounters with lavender routinely trigger memories of specific places and times with a vividness that other sensory experiences rarely achieve. For many people, the scent of lavender is associated with grandmothers’ houses, with certain gardens visited in childhood, with a particular summer that somehow defined an entire relationship.
This mnemonic quality gives lavender a special place in the symbolism of remembrance for mothers who have died. White carnations carry this connotation in the American tradition; in the older English tradition, lavender serves a similar purpose — it is a herb associated with preservation, with the past kept present, with love that continues beyond death.
Thomas à Kempis wrote of lavender that it “comforteth the braine.” William Turner, in his sixteenth-century herbal, recommended it for “all diseases of the head that come of a cold cause and comforteth the braine very well.” Whether or not these medical claims hold up to modern scrutiny, they speak to the ancient association between lavender and the mind — specifically the mind’s capacity for memory, for preserving what is past. To give a mother lavender is to give her, in some sense, the promise that she will be remembered, that the care she has taken will not be forgotten.
Growing Lavender
For the garden, lavender is one of the most accommodating and rewarding of all plants, asking little and giving a great deal. It thrives in poor, well-drained soil and full sun; it is drought-tolerant once established; it requires only an annual clipping after flowering to keep it in good shape for years. A low hedge of lavender along a path — the classic cottage garden device — fills the air with fragrance every time a passerby brushes against it, which is one of the great sensory pleasures of any garden.
Lavandula angustifolia ‘Hidcote’ is the most widely grown of all lavenders, with deep purple flowers on compact plants that are well-suited to edging and hedging. ‘Munstead’, slightly shorter and earlier-flowering, has a softer purple and a particularly intense fragrance. For white lavender — elegant, unusual, and no less fragrant than the purple forms — ‘Vera’ or the more compact ‘Nana Alba’ are excellent choices.
The French lavender, Lavandula stoechas, with its distinctive “rabbit ear” bracts, is more flamboyant and slightly less hardy than the English types, but magnificent in a sheltered spot. Its deep purple, pineapple-scented flowers are unlike those of any other lavender and make it a striking addition to a pot by a sunny doorway — a welcoming, fragrant gesture at the threshold of a home.
Part Ten: The Iris — Wisdom, Courage, and the Rainbow Bridge
Goddess of the Rainbow
The iris — named for the Greek goddess who served as the messenger between the gods and humanity, travelling along the rainbow — is one of the most architecturally magnificent of all garden flowers, and one of the most consistently associated with feminine power and wisdom. Iris, the goddess, connected heaven and earth; she was trusted by both the Olympian gods and by the dead in Hades to carry messages without distortion, to maintain the connection between worlds. In this mythological context, the iris flower carries the symbolism of communication, of the reliable transmission of what is most important, of the bridge between different states of being.
In the context of maternal symbolism, the iris’s association with Isis — the great Egyptian mother goddess — is particularly significant. Iris was sometimes identified with Isis in the ancient world, partly through their shared initial, partly through the similar nature of their roles. Both were intermediaries, both were associated with healing and transformation, both were connected to the idea of protection and guidance. The iris flower’s name thus connects it, through two goddesses, to the maternal principle.
In French heraldry, the fleur-de-lis — long associated with the royal house of France — is generally agreed to be a stylised iris rather than a lily, and its use as a royal symbol connects the iris’s symbolism of regal power to a lineage that in France was always considered to flow through the divine, which is to say through the sacred maternal. The fleur-de-lis appears on the coat of arms of the Blessed Virgin Mary in many French traditions, connecting the iris directly to the supreme expression of Christian maternal symbolism.
The Beauty of the Bearded Iris
The bearded iris — Iris germanica in its many hundreds of cultivars — is one of the most complex and varied flowers in cultivation. The range of colours is extraordinary: from pure white through every shade of cream, yellow, apricot, orange, pink, lilac, blue, purple, bronze, brown, black, and every conceivable combination and variation. The flowers have a particular architecture — three upright petals (standards) and three falls (petals that curve downward), each with a central stripe of colour or a fuzzy “beard” — that gives them an almost architectural quality, a quality of considered design.
For Mother’s Day, irises chosen for their colour carry layers of symbolic meaning. Purple and violet irises have traditionally been associated with wisdom and respect; they are appropriate for mothers who are also women of achievement, who have guided and taught with authority and grace. Blue irises speak of hope and faith, of constancy and trust. White irises carry the familiar symbolism of purity and innocence. Yellow irises — though less common in the bearded family, they appear in the species Iris pseudacorus, the native yellow flag iris — are associated with warmth and energy.
Species Irises: The Wild Side
Among the species irises — those closer to their wild ancestors — are some of the most beautiful and evocative flowers in the genus. Iris unguicularis, the winter iris, flowers from November to February, producing its delicate lavender-blue flowers at the most unexpected and welcome time. Its flowers are fragile and must be cut in bud, warming open in a vase indoors, but the experience of bringing winter colour into the house from the garden has a particular quality of triumph and unexpected joy.
Iris sibirica, the Siberian iris, produces its delicate blue or purple flowers above tall, grassy foliage in late spring. It has a refinement and elegance that the more flamboyant bearded irises lack, and it naturalises easily in damp ground near water, creating drifts of colour that reflect in the surface of streams and ponds with extraordinary effect.
Iris reticulata, the tiny bulbous iris that flowers in February and March, is one of the earliest signs of spring: its deep purple, golden-spotted flowers appear when almost nothing else is in flower, a suddenly brilliant reminder that the winter will end. To give a mother bulbs of Iris reticulata is to give her the promise of early colour in the years to come, year after year, growing more impressive as the colony expands.
Part Eleven: Primrose and Violet — The First Flowers and Ancient Gifts
The Primrose: First of the Year
The primrose — Primula vulgaris — has been associated with the arrival of spring and with maternal love in English tradition since at least the medieval period. It is one of the earliest flowers of the year, appearing in the hedgerows and woodland edges from February onward, its pale, cool-yellow flowers a promise of warmth and colour to come. The scent is delicate, honey-sweet, completely distinctive: one of those scents that carries more emotional weight than it has any right to, given its subtlety.
In the tradition of Mothering Sunday, primroses gathered from the hedgerows were among the flowers most commonly brought home to mothers. The primrose’s early flowering — before almost anything else was available — gave the gatherer what was essentially the first offering of the year, the first fruits of the emerging spring. There is something deeply right about this: the first flowers of spring given to the person who gave you life, a kind of reciprocal generativity.
The primrose also has connections to the fairy world in British folklore, particularly to the tradition of fairy paths and fairy circles. Primroses were said to grow at the entrances to the fairy kingdom, and gathering them required respectful treatment. This liminal quality — the flower as a threshold marker, a point of transition between the ordinary world and something more — is connected to the maternal role as the threshold between non-existence and life, between the unborn and the born.
In Victorian flower language, the primrose signified early youth, or in some interpretations, the specific sentiment “I cannot live without you” — a statement of fundamental dependence that has obvious maternal resonance. The primary relationship, the first attachment, the love that is learned before we know what love is: the primrose carries all of this.
The Violet: Faithfulness and Depth
The sweet violet — Viola odorata — is perhaps the most consistently moving of all wild flowers, partly because of its reticence. The violet grows in sheltered places, in the shade of hedgerows and the edges of ancient woodlands, and its flowers — deep purple, sometimes white, always with that extraordinary fragrance — are produced close to the ground, partly hidden by the heart-shaped leaves that give the plant its other associations. To find violets is always slightly to feel you have discovered a secret.
The violet’s symbolism is consistently associated with faithfulness, modesty, and a love that does not advertise itself. These qualities — of a love that is deep and constant and does not require acknowledgment, that persists in obscurity and gives itself without display — are recognisably maternal. The violet does not compete with more showy flowers; it does not make claims for itself. It simply flowers, year after year, in the same sheltered places, filling the air with its remarkable perfume for those who take the trouble to seek it out.
In Ancient Greece, the violet was associated with Athens and with Io, one of Zeus’s loves who was transformed into a white cow; violets sprang up for her to eat, and the name “Io” was connected etymologically to the word for violet in some ancient sources. But the more significant association is with Persephone: according to some versions of the myth, Persephone was gathering violets — among other spring flowers — when Hades abducted her. The violet thus carries the connotation of spring interrupted, of the tender beginning of things brought suddenly to its end — and also of its return, since Persephone does return, and the violets flower again.
Napoleon Bonaparte had an intense personal connection with violets: they were his favourite flower, and after his exile to Elba his supporters used the violet as a secret symbol of loyalty to him. His first wife, Josephine, was particularly associated with violets, which she wore and cultivated at Malmaison. The connection between violets and Josephine — a mother, a wife, a figure of extraordinary personal magnetism and also of profound vulnerability — gives the flower an additional biographical layer of emotional complexity.
Part Twelve: Forget-Me-Not — Remembrance, Connection, and the Thread of Love
The Flower of True Love
Myosotis — forget-me-not — is a flower of the simplest possible form: five tiny blue petals surrounding a yellow eye, on stems so slender they can barely bear their own weight. They grow in damp, shaded places, in the margins of streams and ponds, in the shade of walls, wherever the conditions suit their modest requirements. And yet in their abundance they create some of the most beautiful garden effects imaginable: pools of true blue — that rare and precious colour in the flower world — washing under tulips, edging paths, filling the spaces between emerging perennials.
The forget-me-not’s symbolism is explicit in its name: this is the flower of remembrance, of love that persists across separation, of a connection that time and distance cannot sever. The name comes from a medieval German legend of a knight who, gathering flowers from a riverbank for his beloved, fell into the torrent and was carried away. As he was swept downstream, he threw the flowers toward her with a last cry: “Vergiss mein nicht” — forget me not. Whether this story gave the flower its name or was invented to explain a name that was already in use, it established a symbolism of love persisting beyond a moment of severance.
For Mother’s Day, the forget-me-not carries its literal meaning with particular force. The relationship between a mother and child is one that survives more forms of separation than almost any other: physical distance, emotional difficulty, the long separations of adult independence, and finally death. The forget-me-not is a flower for acknowledging this continuity — for saying, across whatever distance or time has come between them, I have not forgotten you, I carry you with me, the love between us does not require proximity to continue.
In Queen Victoria’s time, forget-me-nots were woven into the mourning jewellery and worn to commemorate lost loved ones. The Victorians understood, with an explicitness modern culture sometimes finds uncomfortable, that to love someone is also to anticipate losing them, and that the full weight of love includes this anticipation. Forget-me-not, in the Victorian mourning tradition, said: I will carry you in my memory always, you will not disappear from me when you disappear from the world.
For mothers who have died, forget-me-nots are one of the most appropriate of all flowers: not only for their explicit symbolic meaning but for their quality as garden plants. Left to seed, which they do enthusiastically, they return year after year, appearing in unexpected places, naturalising through a garden with a generous randomness that feels less like management and more like gift. A garden in which forget-me-nots are seeding themselves freely is a garden that is giving something back, returning the care invested in it in its own, floral way.
Part Thirteen: Wisteria — Grace, Longing, and the Patient Climber
A Flower of Extraordinary Patience
Wisteria is a plant of two qualities that seem, at first, contradictory: extraordinary vigour and extraordinary patience. In the garden, it can grow with astonishing speed, producing metres of new growth in a season, twisting itself around any support it can reach with an almost muscular determination. And yet it must be cultivated, shaped, and above all waited for: a newly planted wisteria may take several years to flower, sometimes many years, and the experience of waiting for a wisteria to bloom is one that tests even the most patient of gardeners.
When it does flower — and when it does, there is nothing in the garden to compare with it — it produces racemes of pea-like flowers, in lavender, white, or pink depending on the species and cultivar, each raceme sometimes reaching sixty centimetres in length, the flowers closely packed and intensely fragrant, hanging from the bare or barely-leafed stems in a cascade that is at once delicate and overwhelming. A mature wisteria in full flower, draped across the front of a house or over a pergola in the warm May sunshine, is one of the most spectacular sights in British gardens.
The symbolic associations of wisteria — patience, longing, love that waits without complaint, the beauty that is eventually the reward of sustained care — make it peculiarly appropriate as a maternal symbol. The quality of maternal love that wisteria most precisely embodies is the patience of it: the capacity to wait, to tend without immediate reward, to continue investing care and attention in the faith that eventually something magnificent will emerge. This is the patience of a parent raising a child who does not yet know how to give thanks, who receives and receives without yet understanding what they are receiving.
Wisteria is also a plant that outlives almost everything: mature plants that have been growing for a century or more are a feature of old houses and historic gardens throughout Britain, enormous, gnarled, seemingly unkillable, still flowering generously each May. To plant a wisteria is to make a commitment to the future, to plant something whose full magnificence your own children or grandchildren may be the ones to enjoy. This quality of forward-looking care, of establishing something whose full value will only become apparent to a future generation, is itself deeply maternal.
In Japanese Culture
In Japan, the wisteria — fuji — is one of the most beloved and culturally significant of all plants. It is associated with spring, with feminine grace, with the beauty that is not loud or assertive but subtle and profound. Wisteria festivals are held throughout Japan in spring, when the plants in famous gardens and public parks are at their peak. The Japanese wisteria, Wisteria floribunda, produces its extraordinarily long racemes — some cultivars produce racemes of nearly two metres — which hang between the supporting structures in a curtain of colour and fragrance.
In classical Japanese poetry, wisteria is associated with longing and with love that persists across separation — the same symbolic territory occupied by forget-me-not in Western tradition. The trailing, hanging nature of the flowers suggests something reaching toward what it cannot quite grasp, which is the quality of longing precisely described. And in the context of the relationship between mother and adult child — who are separated by the child’s growing independence, who love each other across a distance that is necessary and right but also, on both sides, slightly painful — this symbolism of wisteria-as-longing is movingly appropriate.
Part Fourteen: Roses for Remembrance — White Roses and the Beloved Dead
The Rose Sub Specie Aeternitatis
The white rose holds a special place in the symbolism of remembrance, in traditions East and West. In England, it was the badge of the House of York in the Wars of the Roses; in Scotland, it became associated with Jacobite loyalty and the doomed cause of the Stuart kings; in more recent times, it has been adopted as a symbol of mourning and of love that transcends death.
For Mother’s Day, white roses carry the specific meaning established by Anna Jarvis for white carnations — they are the flower of the day for those whose mothers have died — but they carry this meaning within a much wider symbolic context that goes back to classical antiquity. In Roman culture, white roses were placed on the graves of the beloved dead; the practice of planting roses on graves persisted through the medieval period and into modern times. A white rose at a grave says what is hardest to say in words: I love you still. I have not forgotten. The loss has not ended the love.
Rosa ‘Iceberg’ — the most planted white rose in the world, and one of the most reliable and generous — produces its pure white, softly scented flowers from late spring until the frosts. It has the quality of constancy that makes it appropriate for this kind of remembrance: it does not fail, it does not disappear. It gives its flowers freely and repeatedly, without drama, throughout the long season.
Rosa ‘Madame Hardy’, an old Damask rose from 1832, produces its perfect, quartered white flowers with green eyes at the centre for a shorter but more intense season in early summer. Its fragrance is one of the finest of any rose, and its flowers have a formality and perfection that give them the quality of something honoured rather than merely admired.
The Practice of Planting
For mothers who are no longer living, the planting of a rose — or any plant that will return year after year — in their memory is a practice with deep roots. The living plant as memorial is ancient: the practice of planting trees on graves, of cultivating the plants a person loved at the place where they are buried or remembered, connects the living and the dead through the medium of ongoing life. The plant grows; it changes with the seasons; it is tended by the same hands that once tended the person being remembered.
This practice transforms the garden itself into a kind of memorial, a space in which the beloved dead continue to be present. Gardens planted in memory of loved ones — a Rosa ‘Geranium’ for its blood-red flowers and magnificent autumn hips, because the person remembered always grew it; a clump of Iris ‘Jane Phillips’ because she loved its particular shade of pale blue; a patch of sweet rocket because its fragrance in the evening was her favourite thing about June — carry layers of meaning that accumulate with the passing years. The garden becomes a conversation with the dead, continued beyond the possibility of direct speech.
Part Fifteen: Herbs of the Kitchen Garden — Love Expressed Through Sustenance
The Maternal Herb Garden
Long before the symbolic vocabulary of flowers was codified in Victorian floriography, herbs were the medium through which maternal love expressed itself most practically. The herb garden — the physic garden, the kitchen garden, the stillroom with its bundles of drying plants — was a space of maternal knowledge and maternal power. To know which plant healed a fever, which eased a cough, which could be made into a salve for a burn or a poultice for a sprained ankle, was to possess a form of care that could not be bought or delegated. It was the knowledge of a mother who could look after her family through illness and injury with what the garden provided.
This tradition is ancient. The herb gardens of medieval monasteries preserved and transmitted knowledge that went back to the ancient world; but the knowledge in those formal, documented gardens was largely derived from the much older, undocumented knowledge of women in their household gardens, tending the plants that their mothers and grandmothers had grown before them. Rosemary for remembrance; rue for regret; sage for wisdom; thyme for courage; mint for warmth. The symbolic vocabulary of herbs runs parallel to the symbolic vocabulary of flowers, and it is perhaps even older.
Rosemary — Rosmarinus officinalis, now reclassified as Salvia rosmarinus by taxonomists though the old name endures in common usage — has the most explicit association with memory of any herb. “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance,” says Ophelia in Hamlet, distributing her flowers and herbs in that heartbreaking scene, and Shakespeare was drawing on a well-established tradition. Rosemary was used at both weddings and funerals, carried by both bride and mourner, because it was understood to mark both the beginning and the ending of things, to preserve the memory of what had passed and to consecrate what was beginning.
Sage — Salvia officinalis — has ancient associations with wisdom and with longevity. Its Latin name connects it to the word for wisdom (sapientia) and for being well (salvus). To give sage is to give something that speaks of enduring health and accumulating wisdom: appropriate gifts for a mother who has navigated a long life.
Mint, in its many forms — spearmint, peppermint, apple mint, the extraordinary chocolate mint — is warming, vital, intensely present. It is the herb of hospitality, of welcome, of the good things that come with arrival: mint tea, mint sauce, the garden at the height of summer when the mint is tall and sprawling and requires nothing more than a touch to fill the air with its refreshing scent.
The Gift of Growing Things
For Mother’s Day, a beautifully planted herb pot — rosemary and thyme and sage and lavender, planted with care in terracotta, perhaps with a label written by hand identifying each plant — is a gift that combines the symbolic richness of the herb garden with the practical thoughtfulness of something useful. It says: I want you to cook with these, to brush your hand against them when you pass, to have something that needs your attention and will reward it.
This quality of creating a gentle obligation — of giving something living that asks to be cared for — is itself a gift, particularly for a mother whose children have grown and whose days of intense, daily caregiving are past. A garden is never done; there is always something that needs attending to. And the pleasure of attending to it, of giving care and receiving the response of a healthy, growing plant, is one of the great quiet pleasures of the gardening life.
Part Sixteen: Trees and the Long Span — Gifts for the Future
The Mother Tree
In forest ecology, a concept has emerged in recent decades that has resonated far beyond its scientific context: the idea of the “mother tree.” In old-growth forests, the largest and oldest trees — typically conifers, though the principle applies more broadly — serve as hubs of a vast underground communication and nutrient-sharing network, mediated by mycorrhizal fungi. These mother trees share carbon and water with younger, smaller trees, including their own seedling offspring, through this network. They respond to the needs of their community; they prioritise their own genetic offspring in moments of stress; they appear, through the evidence of the fungi, to be in constant communication with the trees around them.
This concept — that the forest’s ability to sustain itself depends on its oldest, largest, most experienced members, who give from their abundance to those who need more than they have — is, if not literally maternal, profoundly resonant with maternal experience as human beings have always understood it. The mother tree gives from her own resources without depletion; her giving is the source of the forest’s health. To stand beneath an ancient tree and understand that it has been nurturing the plants around it for decades or centuries is to be in the presence of something that illuminates the concept of maternal love by analogy.
The ancient trees of Britain — the veteran oaks of the New Forest, the extraordinary yews of churchyards like the one at Fortingall in Perthshire, estimated to be between two thousand and five thousand years old — are not merely trees. They are repositories of time, witnesses of history, organisms that have outlasted everything around them through sheer tenacity and the quality of giving more than they take.
Planting for the Future
For Mother’s Day, the gift of a tree — properly chosen for the site, properly planted, given with a commitment to help establish it if the recipient wants the help — is the most enduring gift the garden tradition can offer. A tree planted now may be providing shade and fruit and habitat for a century. The knowledge that something living, something that breathes and grows and shelters birds and insects and perhaps grandchildren playing beneath it, has been planted in memory of this day and this love: that is a gift of extraordinary substance.
An apple tree, as we have already discussed, carries the symbolism of maternal generosity and the fruitfulness of sustained care. A cherry tree — Prunus avium in its species form, with its clouds of white blossom in April and its summer cherries; or one of the Japanese cherries, Prunus ‘Tai-Haku’ the Great White Cherry, with its enormous single white flowers on bare stems — carries the more fleeting symbolism of beauty that does not endure but returns, reliably, year after year.
A magnolia — particularly Magnolia stellata, the star magnolia, with its many-petalled white flowers on bare stems in early spring — has a quality of ancient dignity. Magnolias are among the oldest flowering plants on earth, evolving before bees existed and therefore pollinated by beetles; their flowers have an archaic solidity, a thickness of petal, that speaks of something that has persisted through very long spans of time.
Part Seventeen: The Cutting Garden — Flowers for Giving
Planning a Cutting Garden with Mothers in Mind
For those who garden, the most personal expression of love on Mother’s Day is the gift of flowers grown by one’s own hand. The cutting garden — a dedicated area, or even just a few rows in the vegetable garden, devoted to growing flowers for cutting — is one of the most satisfying additions to any garden, and one that yields returns far beyond the space and effort it requires.
Planning a cutting garden with an eye to Mother’s Day requires thinking about what will be at its best in May. This varies somewhat with the garden’s location and the particular year’s weather, but in most British gardens, late April and May bring:
Sweet peas, if they have been sown early enough — October or November sowing, overwintered in a cold frame, gives the longest and most productive plants, and May can see the first flowers of the season. The scent of sweet peas is one of the most celebrated in horticulture, a complex, volatile fragrance that seems to contain the whole of summer in each breath. They have been bred for cut flowers for over a century, and the range of colours available — from pure white through every shade of pink, salmon, orange, red, purple, blue, and lavender — is extraordinary.
Alliums, the ornamental onions, are at their magnificent best in May and June: globes of purple, white, or lilac, sometimes enormous — Allium ‘Globemaster’ can reach thirty centimetres across — hovering on tall stems above the border with an otherworldly geometry. They last extremely well as cut flowers, often holding their form even as they dry, and they have a quality of cheerful drama that makes them irresistible in a vase.
Aquilegias — columbines — with their spurred, nodding flowers in combinations of purple, white, pink, and yellow, are at their peak in May. They are generous self-seeders, which means that once established in a cutting garden they return year after year, often in new and unexpected colour combinations.
Peonies, if they have been planted with cutting in mind — choosing varieties with strong stems and reliable fragrance — will begin to flower in late May, and their brief season (three to four weeks at most) makes every stem precious.
Iris, in the bearded forms, in late May and early June: tall, elegant, unfailingly spectacular, and with a fragrance, in many cultivars, that is one of the most complex and evocative in the garden.
The Art of Arrangement
The flowers gathered from the cutting garden for a Mother’s Day bouquet do not need to be arranged with professional skill to achieve something beautiful. The most important quality in a homegrown bouquet is generosity: not stinginess, not careful calculation of what can be spared, but an armful of the best things the garden is offering at this moment.
The best arrangements for this kind of gift are often the most informal: a loose, abundant bunch held together by its own weight and variety, the stems cut at different lengths so the flowers fall at different heights, the whole thing placed in a large jug or a simple vase with nothing to distract from the flowers themselves. This kind of arrangement says: I went into the garden and gathered everything that was beautiful, and I brought it to you.
Part Eighteen: Wildflower Gardens — The Meadow as Gift
The Return of the Wild
One of the most significant developments in contemporary gardening is the return of the wildflower meadow: the growing recognition that the most beautiful and ecologically valuable gardens are often those that allow native plants their full expression, that work with the natural tendencies of the land rather than against them. The wildflower meadow — whether a small patch in an urban garden or a generous sweep of countryside — brings together many of the flowers most closely associated with the traditional Mothering Sunday: cowslips and ox-eye daisies, red campion and ragged robin, meadow cranesbill and knapweed, the whole glorious, undisciplined, bird-and-butterfly-filled complexity of a field left to flower.
These are the flowers of the lane and the hedgerow along which generations of children walked home to their mothers on Mothering Sunday. They are not flowers of the florist or the hothouse; they are flowers of the English countryside at its most ancient and most beautiful. To give a mother a wildflower meadow — or even to establish a small wildflower corner in her garden — is to give her something that connects directly to the oldest layers of the tradition, before it was commercialised, when the gift was whatever the season offered freely.
The symbolism of wildflowers is the symbolism of what grows without human management, what offers itself regardless of our intentions or our design. In a culture increasingly aware of the fragility of the natural world, the wildflower garden is also an act of ecological care — a gift to the insects and birds that share the land with us, a small but genuine contribution to the health of the wider ecosystem. This quality of care that extends beyond the immediate relationship, that thinks about the wellbeing of the world in which we are all embedded, is itself a maternal quality.
Key Wildflowers and Their Meanings
The cowslip — Primula veris — flowers in April and May, its deep yellow, nodding flowers carried on stems above the basal rosette of leaves. It was once so common in English meadows that children gathered them by the armful; intensive agriculture reduced it dramatically through the twentieth century, but it is returning now as road verges are managed more sympathetically and as wildflower meadow projects multiply. The cowslip means “pensiveness” in some interpretations of the language of flowers, and in others “winning grace” — a combination that speaks of the reflective, graceful quality of love that has been seasoned by time.
The ox-eye daisy — Leucanthemum vulgare — is the larger, wilder cousin of the garden daisy: white petals, golden centre, growing in abundance in ungrazed meadows and on roadsides. It has a straightforwardness, an uncomplicated generosity, that connects it to the simplest and most essential qualities of maternal love. No subtlety, no complication: just brightness, openness, abundance.
Red campion — Silene dioica — flowers in May and June in hedgerows and woodland edges, its deep pink flowers appearing at the same time as the bluebells with which it often grows, creating one of the most beautiful colour combinations the British flora offers. Its name in the language of flowers — “youthful love” — speaks to the beginning of things, to the love that is discovered rather than earned.
Part Nineteen: The Scent of Memory — Perfume and the Mother Connection
How Fragrance Carries Love
The relationship between fragrance and maternal memory is one of the most universal experiences in human life. The scent of a particular perfume — worn by a grandmother, applied by a mother before an evening out — can return us to the past with a completeness that no photograph or voice recording quite achieves. Scent bypasses the analytical mind, bypassing the hippocampus’s normal processing and arriving in consciousness already freighted with emotional content, already accompanied by the full sensory and emotional detail of the moment when it was first encountered.
This neurological directness — the way scent speaks to us before we have had a chance to think about it, reaching the emotional centres of the brain faster than any other sensory input — is part of what makes fragrant flowers such powerful vehicles for maternal symbolism. The scent of roses or lily of the valley or lavender does not have to mean what we have learned it means; it means it immediately, viscerally, before any intellectual process intervenes.
The most important fragrant plants for Mother’s Day — chosen not for their visual impact alone but for the emotional weight their scent carries — include, beyond those already discussed:
Stocks — Matthiola incana — with their dense, clove-like fragrance that fills the evening garden with something approaching the scent of warm spice cake. Night-scented stocks, Matthiola longipetala bicornis, are almost ugly by day, their small mauve flowers wilting and folded, but they release their extraordinary fragrance at dusk with an abandon that makes the plainness of their daytime appearance beside the point.
Philadelphus — mock orange — flowers in June, its white four-petalled flowers releasing a fragrance that is genuinely reminiscent of orange blossom, heady and sweet. The best species and cultivars — Philadelphus ‘Belle Étoile’ with its maroon-spotted centres; Philadelphus coronarius with its pure, intense fragrance — are among the most powerfully scented of all garden shrubs, and they are tough, unfussy plants that reward even the most neglectful of gardens.
Honeysuckle — Lonicera periclymenum — wild in English hedgerows but also available in cultivated forms that flower more freely and over a longer period. The scent of honeysuckle in the evening — drifting across a warm garden, carried on the still air of a summer night — is one of those scents that contains within it an entire sensory world: warmth, stillness, the sounds of insects, the quality of light that accompanies the end of a long summer day. It is, above all others, a nostalgic scent, a scent that makes the past present.
Part Twenty: A Closing Meditation — The Garden as Act of Love
What the Garden Says
We return, at the end of this long exploration, to where we began: to the garden itself, and to the question of what it means to give someone a flower.
The answer is not simple. It never was. The flower carries everything that has gathered around it — myth and history, religious iconography and folk custom, the private meanings assigned by individuals and the public meanings established by cultures. It carries the memory of every other time this flower was given, every other morning in May when someone cut an armful of roses or primroses or sweet peas and carried them to someone they loved.
But it also carries something that precedes all of these meanings, something that was there before the myths and the symbolism, before the language of flowers and the traditions of Mothering Sunday: the simple, irreducible fact of a flower, of its beauty, of the care and desire to give that goes into the act of cutting it and carrying it. That simplicity is not diminished by all the complexity that has accumulated around it. It is, if anything, deepened: the flower is both itself, utterly and completely, and also the vehicle for everything that cannot be said in any other way.
To give a mother flowers — whether they are carnations bought from a florist, roses cut from the garden, wildflowers gathered from the hedgerow, or a single stem of lily of the valley from a drift in a shaded corner — is to participate in one of the oldest and most continuous human traditions: the act of bringing beauty to the person who brought you into the world. It is to speak in a language older than language, using materials provided by the earth itself.
The Garden as Inheritance
Every garden that has been loved is, in some sense, an inheritance. The plants that were established by previous gardeners — the wisteria someone planted forty years ago that now frames the whole front of the house; the peony someone divided and moved from her mother’s garden three houses ago; the iris whose name is forgotten but whose blue is precisely the blue of a June morning — these plants carry within them the care of the people who planted them, the love of gardeners who are no longer present.
This is the deepest form of maternal inheritance the garden offers: not just the plants themselves, though these are precious, but the practice of caring for them. The knowledge of when to prune and when to leave alone, when to water and when to trust the rain, when to cut for the vase and when to let the plant give its energy to the root — this knowledge is passed from hand to hand, from gardener to gardener, from mother to child, as reliably as any genetic material.
To learn to garden from someone who loves you is to receive a gift that cannot be precisely valued and cannot be entirely given back. It can only be paid forward: to the next person who comes to your garden and wants to know why the roses look so well, what the secret is, how you learned. You tell them what you were told, and something that someone gave you passes on into the world.
The Final Flower
There is, perhaps, one more flower to mention: the one that has not been discussed, the one that is particular to the individual reading this. The flower that, for you, carries the weight of your specific mother, your specific relationship, the particular history between the two of you. It might be a flower from the garden she kept, or a flower she always wore in her hair at weddings, or a flower that bloomed on the windowsill throughout your childhood, or a flower whose scent you encountered once in her presence and have never since been able to dissociate from the thought of her.
This flower — whatever it is — is the most powerful symbol of all. It does not need to have a mythological history or a presence in Renaissance painting or an entry in Victorian floriography. It needs only to be what it is: a living thing that has absorbed, in your experience of it, the quality of your love for another living thing. This is what flowers do. This is why we give them.
Appendix: A Guide to Seasonal Availability for Mother’s Day in Britain
What Flowers When
For those planning a Mother’s Day garden gift with an eye to what is naturally available in the British garden in early to mid-May:
In flower in most British gardens in early May: Tulips (though the latest cultivars and species will be beginning to pass), alliums (early species such as Allium hollandicum), aquilegias, cowslips, forget-me-nots, lily of the valley, wood anemones, primroses, violets (though these are beginning to pass by May), apple blossom, pear blossom, wisteria, rhododendrons, azaleas, Camassia, muscari (ending), wallflowers, honesty.
Coming into flower in mid-May: Alliums (main season), bearded iris, ox-eye daisies, red campion, sweet rocket, geraniums, Salvia nemorosa, Antirrhinum (in warm years and sheltered positions), early peonies, Philadelphus (in warm springs), Rosa (first flowers of early cultivars).
To plan for from the cutting garden: Sweet peas sown in autumn and overwintered will be producing their first flowers. Annual cornflowers sown in September will be at their peak. Honesty — grown for its silky-white seedheads, not yet formed in May, but the purple flowers are at their peak.
From the florist: Whatever the international cut flower trade is offering — which in May typically includes roses, carnations, lilies, gerberas, alstroemeria, stocks, sweet peas (from warmer countries), tulips, irises — supplemented by British-grown material from specialist growers, which increasingly includes seasonal alternatives that the mainstream trade rarely stocks.
A Note on Seasonality and Sustainability
The history of the cut flower industry is not always a comfortable one: the cut flowers sold by British florists for most of the year are grown in vast quantities in Kenya, Ethiopia, Ecuador, Colombia, and the Netherlands, often in conditions of intensive production with significant environmental impact in terms of water use, pesticide application, and carbon emissions from air freight. This does not mean that buying cut flowers is indefensible, but it does mean that the question of where flowers come from is worth asking.
British-grown flowers — from specialist growers who farm with ecological awareness, and who are increasingly easy to find through the internet and through farmers’ markets — have a different quality as well as a different environmental footprint. They are seasonal, which means they are what the current moment is actually producing, not what it can be made to produce with sufficient technological intervention. They may not be perfect by the standards of the international trade, which tends to value uniformity and long vase life above all else. But they have the quality of the moment they come from, the quality of this particular spring in this particular place, which no imported flower can quite match.
The most sustainable Mother’s Day gift from a garden, of course, is always the flower grown by the giver: grown from seed or from division of a parent plant, tended through the season, cut in the morning with the dew still on it, given with the full knowledge of everything that went into its production — the compost turned in autumn, the seeds sown in spring, the slugs deterred, the water given on dry mornings, the anticipation of this moment building through the season. This flower — grown with love, given with love — is the fullest expression of what the tradition of Mother’s Day flowering has always meant: not just beauty, but the care that produces beauty; not just the gift, but the long preparation that makes the gift possible.
A garden, rightly seen, is never finished. It is always in the process of becoming: responding to the season, to the care it receives, to the passage of time. The same might be said of love between a mother and child — a relationship that does not complete itself at any particular moment but continues to grow, to change, to surprise, to deepen. In this sense, every garden is a small model of what maternal love looks like sustained through time: patient, responsive, generative, full of things that are just beginning to flower.
Bibliography and Further Reading
The tradition of writing about flowers and their meanings is almost as old as the tradition of giving them. Readers wishing to explore the subjects covered in this guide in greater depth will find much to reward them in the following areas:
The Victorian language of flowers: Numerous dictionaries of flower symbolism were published in the nineteenth century, ranging from the scholarly to the fanciful. The most reliable and enjoyable is perhaps Charlotte de la Tour’s Le Langage des Fleurs (1819), the original French source from which much of the Victorian tradition derived.
Classical mythology and its botanical connections: The standard works of mythology — Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths, Ovid’s Metamorphoses in any good translation — contain the stories referenced throughout this guide. For specifically botanical readings of classical texts, Richard Mabey’s Flora Britannica provides a reliable and beautifully written account of the cultural history of British native plants.
The history of carnations and Mother’s Day: Katharine Lane Antolini’s Memorializing Motherhood: Anna Jarvis and the Struggle for Control of Mother’s Day (2014) provides the definitive account of the campaign to establish Mother’s Day and the central role of the carnation in that campaign.
The ecology of old-growth forests and mother trees: Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree (2021) provides both the scientific evidence for and the personal narrative around the concept of the mother tree in forest ecosystems.
Roses and their history: Charles Quest-Ritson’s Climbing Roses of the World and The Old Rose Advisor by Brent C. Dickerson are among the most comprehensive references for the history and cultivation of roses. Graham Stuart Thomas’s writings on old roses remain unsurpassed for their combination of horticultural knowledge and literary quality.
The cutting garden: Sarah Raven’s The Cutting Garden (1996) established the modern approach to growing flowers for cutting in British gardens and remains one of the most practically useful and visually inspiring books on the subject.
Wildflowers and their cultural history: Flora Britannica by Richard Mabey is the most comprehensive account of the relationship between British wild plants and human culture, and an essential companion to any exploration of the symbolic dimensions of wildflower gardening.