A florilegium—etymologically linked with its Greek synonym, anthology (both, literally, flower-gathering)—first applied to a collection of small, engraved flower pictures, then to a botanical text, and has come to refer more broadly to collections of textual excerpts, the “flowers” of literature. Additionally, the term florilegium applied to flower-books dedicated to the ornamental plants typical of a Victorian flower garden, rather than the more utilitarian herbals with their descriptions of medicinal plant usages. This proliferation of meanings directs the conceptual layout of this project: this florilegium is a collection of brief, interconnected texts engaged with the passage of flowers between the scientific and the ornamental. It is about discursive transformations, and it is about gendered excess.
I trace this tension between the vital surface life of flowers and the ornamental style with which they have come to be associated through collections of artifacts, historical figures, and botanical texts from the 17th to 19th centuries. I’m interested both in modes of scientific description, stylistic protocols for writing about flowers, and modes of representation, tensions around their illustration.
Each section charts a specific circuit between the scientific and ornamental, beginning with the Enlightenment vision of a true-to-nature description purged of “amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style” (Sprat), where figurative flourishes function as epistemic vice. Thomas Martyn’s translation of Rousseau’s Letters on the Elements of Botany, Addressed to a Lady, offers an example of a discursive tension around flowers: in Rousseau’s letters, the straightforward pursuit of botany, matching the stylistic norm of a “purified” scientific diction, is fringed with a language of flowers as containers for the appropriate affect and behavior of the women to which he writes.
The Linnaean descriptive regime around naming, describing, and illustrating plants, as Daston and Galison’s Objectivity contends, placed an emphasis on training the eye, creating a practice of specialized and selective looking, “one that saw past the surfaces of plants, bones, or crystals to underlying forms” (60). I want to place this epistemological vision of the botanist’s eye beside the demands placed on the designer’s eye, through the writings of Christopher Dresser, a designer who studied and wrote on botany, as well as on the “ministrations of plants to ornaments.” Between botany and decorative design, the creation of a vision in search of underlying forms within nature complicates the distinction between flowers’ surface ornamentation and structural utility, as both convey the flowers’ “vital force.”
The Flora Danica/Flora Delanica section presents two narratives: that of the comprehensive botanical atlas of plants native to Denmark, the Flora Danica, the plates of which were painted onto an opulent porcelain dinner set in 1790, intended as a gift for Catherine the Great of Russia; and that of Mary Delany’s “paper mosaicks”—Flora Delanica—over 1,000 botanically accurate collages of flower specimen, created by the then-72-year-old Delany out of many minute pieces of colored paper, occasionally with some bits of plant matter folded into the reproduction, and using techniques from her extensive familiarity with cutting paper needlework patterns. These narratives raise questions of royal patronage, objets de luxe, and the nationalist project of much botanical illustration, as well as genteel women’s craft, the practice of which makes for the detailed looking and handiwork necessary to bring a scientific accuracy into this new art form.
Finally, in an interview in the Poetry Project Newsletter, poet Lisa Robertson asks, “What is to flourish? How can language be our best ornament?” To flourish is to blossom, to flower, to thrive; it is to grow vigorously and luxuriantly; it is the lively proliferation by which certain plants self-style. To flourish is also to adorn, to embellish, as with literary or rhetorical flourishes; here it signifies a kind of stylistic amplification. In a return to flower rhetoric, I will consider flower dictionaries, Victorian artifacts that claim a “language of flowers,” albeit one that applies sentiments onto the material organisms in a devitalizing emblematization. I want to put this “flower language” into play against a so-called “florid” prose style—a style that exceeds descriptive norms and is often castigated for this excess, yet which offers language in its sensuous detail as resistant materiality, calling attention to the surface “where lively variability takes place” (Robertson, “Rubus Armeniacus”).

Christopher Dresser, Pollen Grain drawing
-Carolyn