Braddon's references to an old-fashioned garden reveal a cultural engagement with flowers as symbols of particular moments in history and convey the constancy of botanical life. It has been argued that gardens are created, adapted, or used to provide spaces and forms of a ritual or symbolic ...
There were flowers in the windows; gaudy scarlet geraniums, which seemed to enjoy an immunity from all the ills to which geraniums are subject, so impossible was it to discover a faded leaf amongst their greenness, or the presence of blight amidst their wealth of blossom. There were birdcage...
She went round the gardens and shrubberies in the early morning, looking sadly at everything, as if she were bidding the trees and flowers a long farewell. The rhododendron thickets were shining with dew, the grassy tracks in that wilderness of verdure were wet and cold under Vixen's fee...
Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife (1864) and Rhoda Broughton’s Red as a Rose Is She (1870)Numerous publications documenting the meanings attributed to various blooms and plants entered the early-nineteenth-century book market, with Charlotte de Latour's The Language of Flowers(1819)......