Ye Olde Valentine
I just added a deep and thoughtful quote to our homepage from Michael Pollan's "Botany of Desire" about the mystique of flowers being rooted in our sense of time -- the fleeting nature of their beauty on one hand, and the hope and anticipation they bring as they grow on the other. This intrigue may be one of the reasons flowers are widely given as gifts, and then I wondered: how long has giving flowers been a tradition?
I don't know about you, but I have never gone in much for Valentine's Day.
It seems like such a manufactured holiday full of insincere gifts and cards, coupled with high expectations to receive overtures of love that I've been both intimidated by it, and also turned off by the commercialized pap that crowds out whatever authentic sentiment I might be ready to share. But after some quick digging in the world's knowledge base, I realize now that the roots of Valentine's Day and it's association with flowers go back much farther than I realized -- nearly two thousand years!
Relic of St. Valentine in the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Rome, Italy
image credit: Dnalor 01, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
There were several people named Valentine who were sainted by the Catholic Church -- the first of which was Valentine of Rome who was martyred in 269 CE and sainted in 496 CE. Relics of St. Valentine were exhibited in several places, but his flower-crowned skull might be the most dramatic exhibit of St. Valentine, and perhaps the earliest association of flowers with St. Valentine! (Although to be honest I don't know how long his skull has worn the flower crown . . .)
While there are several legends and stories surrounding the various St. Valentines and their martyrdom, the date of February 14 figures in as the date of one martyrdom or the date of burial -- although very little verifiable historical records remain. In any case, any celebration of St. Valentine had nothing to do with romantic love, but were instead reminders to parishioners of that extreme dedication to the faith is culturally adored.
Like many of our modern holidays with culturally Christian roots, if you keep peeling away at the onion of history you find interesting pre-Christian similarities. In what might be only a coincidence, in Ancient Rome, Lupercalia was a holiday celebrated February 13 - 15 to honor Pan and Juno, the gods of love, marriage and fertility. Apparently connected more to purification and health, Lupercalia had only undertones of fertility and none to love. Scholars have not linked Lupercalia to Valentine's Day concretely, but it suggests there may be something innate in us that desires a celebration of some kind two months after the winter solstice as the days begin to noticeably lengthen and some cool season plants start to push new stalks through the earth.
Poets as early as Geoffrey Chaucer have connected Saint Valentine's Day to the mating of birds and the coming of spring. In 1382 he wrote the following verse in Parliament of Fowls describing a dream of a parliament convened for birds to choose their mates. The verse was dedicated to the first anniversary of King Richard II of England to Anne of Bohemia -- two teenaged monarchs who I imagine the population thought represented true and innocent young love (but who were likely arranged to be married for strategic reasons):
"For this was on Saint Valentine's Day
When every bird comes there to choose his match
Of every kind that men may think of
And that so huge a noise they began to make
That earth and air and tree and every lake
Was so full, that not easily was there space
For me to stand—so full was all the place."
The earliest mention of Valentine's Day as an annual celebration of love comes from the French in 1400 when the royalty threw an popular annual feast with love songs, poetry, dancing, and a court where royal ladies would rule on lovers' quarrels.
Referring to someone as "my Valentine" has been traced first to a French poem from the 1400's, written by a duke who was being held in the Tower of London as a prisoner of war in a letter that he wrote to his wife. In the 1600's, Shakespeare also reinforced usage of the phrase "my Valentine" by including it in Ophelia’s lament in Hamlet.
Even the canonical Valentine's Day poem you became aware of as a kid is pretty old. It comes from Gammer Gurton's Garland, a nursery rhyme collection published in 1784:
"The rose is red, the violet's blue,
The honey's sweet, and so are you.
Thou art my love and I am thine;
I drew thee to my Valentine:
The lot was cast and then I drew,
And Fortune said it shou'd be you."
I find it surprising that this rhyming structure could persist in our culture for so long! While human impermanence seems to be the rule despite many people's longing for a legacy that outlives the body, exceptions to this impermanence are most interesting -- roads and now rhymes (apparently), are two of them that stay with us over many human generations.
In the 1800's, the current traditions surrounding Valentine's Day solidified into what we experience today. There was a book published in 1797 with the title The Young Man's Valentine Writer that targeted men who were struggling with composing verse for his lover on Valentine's Day and by 1840 over 400,000 Valentine's Day messages were sent via the mail in Britain. Chocolate bonbons in heart shaped boxes made the scene in 1868 when British Cadbury introduced "Fancy Boxes" -- so even that cliché gift is over 150 years old.
An embossed paper lace Valentine’s Day Card from ca. 1860, unknown artist
image credit: Museum of London, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The young United States imported the trend commercially in 1847 with embossed paper lace Valentine's Day cards made by Esther Howland who was inspired by an English Valentine she received from an associate of her father's. Her father operated a large stationary store, so it was a natural fit for Esther, who imported the materials to make the Valentine's from England. Since Esther's enterprise of 175 years ago, America has done what we do best -- commercialize and commodify! -- to an holiday that now sees over 1 billion Valentine's exchanged each year in the US (counting the ubiquitous Valentine's Card exchange in primary schools) and an annual national expenditure of $26 billion.
Of course, flowers form a key aspect of our Valentine's Day tradition, and one can see those roots deep in the lore of the holiday to when it was a celebration in the anticipation of springtime. However, I suspect that the connection was solidified as modern concepts of Valentine's Day were nascent as another trend was proliferating in Victorian England: floriography (language of flowers). Communicating coded messages through flowers has been practiced for thousands of years, but within Victorian England's culture of indirectness, using floral arrangements to reveal feelings which could not be spoken aloud became popular. Floral dictionaries helped senders and receivers to code and decode these messages transmitted in small "talking bouquets" called nosegays or tussie-mussies. It is an easy step to imagine on a holiday newly charged with the thrill of romance that people would use their en vogue flower language to signal their affections.
If you skipped to the end of this long post to find the punchline, here it is: Valentine's Day is really old although with a somewhat fractured origin story that includes pagan ritual, martyrdom, mirroring of nature, and finally only about 175 years ago, a commercialization aspect. This is all much older and more interesting than I imagined it was — I have new respect for this holiday and am reminded at how ignorance is a hurdle to wonder.
The connection between flowers and Valentine's Day likely solidified in the 1800's with Victorian England's fascination with floriography, the language of flowers. While our current American culture isn't well versed in floriography, sending flowers remains one of the best ways to tell a friend or lover that you value their presence in your life, so even if you can't be bothered to encode the meaning of a zinnia or a snapdragon, know that your message will hit the mark no matter when you send them!
