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Famously, Oscar Wilde asked his fellow gay friends to wear a green carnation in their lapels in proud solidarity at the premiere of his play, Lady Windermere’s Fan, in 1892. Some even had negative connotations – yellow carnations, for example, represented rejection and disappointment.

Across the Royal Parks you'll find many different flower colours, with our talented team growing half a million plants each year in the Hyde Park super nursery.

Lavender roses in particular are often sent on Valentine’s Day and used for gay weddings. Yaletown was also home to two of the most famous gay bars, The Gandy Dancer on Hamilton Street and The Quadra, located at 1055 Homer Street on top of a postal sorting station.

Love Hands by June Jung, Vancouver 2022

Love Hands by June Jung, Vancouver 2022

Sylvester floral mannequin created by Bellevue Floral Co., San Francisco 2023

Sylvester floral mannequin created by Bellevue Floral Co., San Francisco 2023

Deni Todorovic floral mannequin created by Paper Daisy Studio, Sydney 2023

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Flower power and LGBT+ history

Throughout time, it’s easy to trace how flowers have taken on symbolic meaning for different cultures, religions and social groups.

The ancient Greeks associated roses with Aphrodite, the goddess of love, while the ancient Egyptians believed that the lotus represented rebirth and creation. 

The Victorians were particularly prolific with the meanings they assigned to flowers, developing an entire language – ‘floriography’ – which they used to communicate with each other.

While very little of her poetry has survived to the modern day, the fragments that remain have had an unquestionable impact on the lesbian community.

Much of her surviving work contains mentions of garlands of flowers, including violets as well as roses and crocuses. Giving someone a bouquet of flowers could convey all sorts of meanings depending on the specific flowers chosen, from love and devotion to remembrance and forgiveness.

Red represents life, orange is for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, blue for harmony and purple for spirit.

The language of flowers, or floriography, was the Victorian trend of applying meanings to certain flowers to reflect specific emotions or sentiments, allowing subtle messages to be communicated through carefully-curated bouquets.

Playwright Tennessee Williams worked violets into his play Suddenly Last Summer through the character Mrs. Violet Venable. (See it recreated by our in-house Fleuriste June Jung in Downtown Vancouver, in larger-than-life floral 'Love Hands').

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From Ancient Greece to the roaring twenties in New York to modern day Vancouver, flowers have been important to the LGBTQ2+ communities, with special meanings and symbolism. But there are many who still wear lavender colours as a symbol of remembrance and resistance.

Roses

Roses are synonymous with love and romance all over the world.

But in Japan, roses became a symbol for gay men in the 1960s.

Previously a more pejorative word, the rose was reclaimed in 1961, with the publication of ‘Bara Kei’ (Killed by Roses), a collection of photos of gay writer Yukio Mishima by photographer Eikoh Hosoe. 

This inspired the creation of Asia’s first commercially produced gay magazine, ‘Barazoku’ (Rose Tribe), which helped popularise the term ‘bara’ for gay men, and cemented the symbology of the rose in the gay community.

While the term bara is now used less in Japan, the rose is still seen as an icon of gay men in Japan.

Roses are also used as a symbol by the trans community, especially with regards to Trans Day of Remembrance. 

The phrase “give us our roses while we’re still here” is used as a reminder that while it is good to remember those lost to violence, it is better for us all to make efforts to make the world a safer place for the trans community.

The language of flowers

These are just a few of the flowers that have been adopted as symbols by the queer community, but it’s not exhaustive. 

There’s many other plant symbols; like the green carnation popularised by Oscar Wilde and a novel inspired by him, and the lily which became a lesbian counterpart to the rose in the pages of Barazoku.

Today, flowers are commonly seen as a part of vibrant Pride displays, serving as a reminder of their history as symbols of solidarity, resistance and empowerment. 

Queer Nature

Celebrating diversity in art, plants and fungi.

Deni Todorovic floral mannequin created by Paper Daisy Studio, Sydney 2023

Deni Todorovic floral mannequin created by Paper Daisy Studio, Sydney 2023

In the late 1970s, a rainbow flag created by artist Gilbert Baker made its debut at the San Francisco event to symbolize Gay Pride and has since become an iconic symbol.

To see more of the stunning Pride-inspired floral artwork created by Fleurs de Villes fleuristes, see our Galleries. Depending on the translation, wreaths, garlands or diadems of violets being placed on the ’slender neck‘ of a girl.

Sappho’s passionate writing on the delicate beauty of woman led to both her name and her nationality becoming intrinsically linked to women who love women, ‘sapphic’ and ‘lesbian’ respectively.

The 1926 play The Captive, which chronicled the tale of a woman in love with another woman but trapped in a false engagement with a man, featured the exchange of violets as a symbol of love.

The play was popular amongst the queer community in New York, with many women in the audience wearing violets on their person in a show of solidarity.

Pansies

It seems quite fitting that another flower intrinsically linked with LGBTQ+ history began life as a violet.

The garden pansy is a cultivar of several different violet species, including Viola tricolor.

And the world-famous Little Sister’s Book Store and Art Emporium still exists today, now on Davie Street, after surviving several attempted bombings and challenging Canada Customs in the Supreme Court for its right to import so-called “obscene materials” from the U.S. So many milestones achieved, and so many yet to come.

Fleurs de Villes has celebrated Pride across the world: from San Francisco, to Sydney, Australia for World Pride, and of course in our home town of Vancouver, Canada.

First cultivated in the 19th century, the pansy became the symbol for humanist and freethought movements, due to the name coming from the French word for thought, pensée.

But the pansy was also notably used throughout the 20th century as a somewhat derogatory term for homosexual men.

Along with buttercup, daisy, and other flowery language (including the somewhat nonspecific ‘horticultural lad’), pansy was a term used to refer to gay men, suggesting them to be non-masculine and delicate.

But during the 1920’s and 30’s, the flower lent its name to the Pansy Craze, a brief golden age for drag clubs and gay friendly bars predominantly in the USA.

With prohibition in full swing, the underground club scene in New York became a hot spot for LGBTQ+ nightlife.

Protestors carried flowers in New York to commemorate the Stonewall Riots in what is considered the very first Pride parade in 1970. Ancient Greek poet Sappho, who hailed from the island of Lesbos (the root word of lesbian,) wrote of women and girls frolicking together with garlands of violets in their hair; ever since violets have been associated with female lovers.