# The Language of Flowers as Secret Communication in Her Little Flowers
The Language of Flowers as Secret Communication in Her Little Flowers
In Shannon Morgan’s Her Little Flowers, the Victorian language of flowers operates as a private code that carries the novel’s deepest truths—love, grief, hatred, and warning—across generations. The thematic claim is precise: flowers are not decoration but a deliberate, secret communication system that the Thwaite women use to say what cannot be spoken aloud. Because the characters live in a world where direct emotional expression is dangerous or impossible, the garden and its blooms become a living archive of family history, one that Francine must learn to read before she can understand her own past.
A Code Passed from Mother to Daughter
The novel establishes early that Eleanor Thwaite taught her daughters to read and speak through plants. In a memory from the summer of 1969, Eleanor quizzes young Rosie on chamomile, prompting her to recite an old litany: “A boon is chamomile to divert black curses.” The scene shows that plant knowledge is not merely botanical but protective and secretive—a body of lore passed down through the Thwaite women and recorded in a heavy kitchen book Eleanor calls the Book of Shadows. Bree, the eldest daughter, notes that she loves keeping secrets, and the language of flowers is precisely that: a secret shared only among the initiated.
Francine inherits this fluency. In the present timeline, she reads the graveyard’s overgrown plants as easily as text. When she walks among the Victorian tombs, she identifies celandine for family reunited in the afterlife, bluebells and daffodils for grief, dandelion for the fragility of life, and Amaranthus for endless love. The plants “spoke to her in the secret language she understood.” This moment establishes Francine as a reader of the code, but it also reveals that her fluency is incomplete—she can name the meanings, yet she has not yet understood the messages her own mother planted for her.
The Graveyard as a Chronicle of Hatred
One of the novel’s most striking uses of the flower language appears in the family graveyard, where Francine discovers a grave that breaks the pattern of remembrance and love. The unmarked mound is covered in plants that “shrieked a terrible hatred”: monkshood, black dahlias, a skeletal rosebush, tansy, St John’s wort, basil, and lobelia. Francine recoils, recognizing that whoever lies there was “truly hated—a loathing that had endured and flourished through time in a dark floral chronicle.”
This grave is a secret communication in its most hostile form. Unlike the other graves, which speak of grief and enduring love, this one encodes a curse that has outlived its subject. The flowers are not merely symbolic; they are a deliberate, sustained act of condemnation. Francine’s horror signals that she understands the message even before she knows who is buried there. The grave becomes a plot engine: it raises questions about the family’s hidden history and pushes Francine toward the truth about her siblings’ deaths.
The Garden as a Memorial to Lost Children
As Francine digs up her garden in search of answers, she uncovers a different kind of floral message. The bed encircling the old dogwood tree contains peonies, chrysanthemums, ranunculus, lantana, purple crocuses, and delphiniums—each planted by Eleanor in memory of a child. Francine whispers the names as she touches the plants: “Viola” for the peony, “Agnes” for the chrysanthemums, “Madeleine’s Ranunculus,” and her own lantana. The low thicket of purple crocuses is for Monty, the brother who “hadn’t lived long enough to have his own flower.”
This flower bed is the novel’s most poignant example of secret communication. Eleanor could not speak of her dead children, so she wrote their personalities into the soil. Francine realizes that the garden is “more personal and descriptive than any photograph could have been.” The flowers do not just name the children; they describe them—peony for Viola’s shy compassion, white chrysanthemum for Agnes’s honesty, dogwood for Bree’s endurance and rebirth. The garden becomes a memorial that only Francine, with her inherited fluency, can fully read.
The dogwood itself carries layered meaning. Miss Cavendish tells Francine that Eleanor said all young children were crocuses until their personalities matured to suit their true flower. Bree, she recalls, was a tree—dogwood. Francine immediately supplies the meanings: reliability, endurance, love unbroken in adversity, and rebirth. The dogwood growing over Bree’s grave is therefore not accidental; it is Eleanor’s final message about her eldest daughter, one that Francine only decodes after years of confusion.
Protective Herbs and the Fear of Evil
The language of flowers also operates as a system of defense. Francine’s nightly scattering of protective herbs and her burdock bracelet are inherited rituals from her mother, who “was clear that they kept evil out.” Miss Cavendish criticizes this as “all that nonsense with those protection herbs,” but Francine insists they are not nonsense. The herbs are another form of secret communication—a conversation with the unseen, a way of speaking to whatever might threaten the manor.
This protective language is tied to the novel’s darker themes. Francine’s garden is, as Todd observes, “a veritable death trap to the unwary.” She lists the toxic plants—moonflower, foxglove, rhododendron, hydrangea, oleander—and realizes that almost every plant in her garden has some form of toxicity. The moonflower, her mother’s flower, is “to bloom in dark times,” and Francine only now understands how dark those times were. The garden’s beauty is a mask for danger, just as the family’s floral language masks grief, hatred, and warning.
The Author’s Note and the Novel’s Intent
Morgan’s author’s note confirms that the language of flowers is central to the novel’s design. She describes her fascination with “secret languages that are not spoken at all yet are full of symbolism understood only by the initiated few.” She cites Jean Marsh’s The Illuminated Language of Flowers and its opening line: “What a charming conceit it is to communicate through flowers instead of words.” Morgan explains that the language dates back to the pharaohs and gained particular attention in Victorian England, where articulating emotion was frowned upon. She then connects this to priest holes—hidden spaces built to shelter persecuted priests—drawing a parallel between floral secrecy and architectural secrecy. Both are ways of hiding truth from those who would destroy it.
This authorial framing clarifies the theme’s purpose. The language of flowers is not a quaint historical curiosity; it is a survival mechanism. The Thwaite women use it to encode love and hatred, to memorialize the dead, and to protect the living. Like the priest holes, the flowers are a hidden architecture of meaning, built to withstand persecution and time.
Complexity and Contradiction
The theme is not without its complications. The flower language is powerful, but it is also imperfect. Francine can read the meanings of plants, yet she cannot remember the events they describe. Her fluency in the code does not grant her access to the memories she has suppressed. The garden speaks, but Francine must dig—literally and figuratively—to understand what it is saying.
There is also a moral ambiguity in the code. The same language that expresses a mother’s love for her dead children also expresses a hatred so enduring it is planted over a grave. The flowers are not inherently good or evil; they are tools, and the message depends on the sender. Eleanor used the language to protect and memorialize, but the unmarked grave shows that the same code can be used to condemn. This duality makes the theme rich rather than sentimental.
Finally, the novel suggests that the language of flowers is a substitute for speech, and that substitution has costs. Eleanor could not tell Francine the truth about her siblings, so she planted it instead. Miss Cavendish kept Eleanor’s secrets out of loyalty, and Francine grew up isolated and fearful. The flowers preserved the truth, but they also preserved the silence. The epilogue offers a partial resolution: Francine replaces the dark plants on George Thwaite’s grave with white tulips and purple hyacinths, and she plants snowdrops over the remains of Agnes, Viola, and Rosina. The language of flowers is still spoken, but now it speaks of forgiveness and renewal rather than hatred and grief.
Study Questions and Answers
1. What does the unmarked grave in the family graveyard communicate, and why is Francine so disturbed by it? The grave is covered in plants that encode hatred—monkshood, tansy, St John’s wort, basil, and lobelia. Francine recognizes the message immediately, even without a headstone, and recoils because the hatred has “endured and flourished through time.” The grave reveals that the family’s floral language can express cruelty as easily as love, and it raises questions about who was buried there and why.
2. How does Eleanor Thwaite use the garden to memorialize her dead children? Eleanor plants a flower for each child in the bed encircling the dogwood tree: peony for Viola, chrysanthemum for Agnes, ranunculus for Madeleine, lantana for Francine, and purple crocuses for Monty. The flowers describe each child’s personality, making the garden “more personal and descriptive than any photograph.” Francine only decodes this message when she digs up the garden, realizing her mother had written her grief into the soil.
3. What does the dogwood tree symbolize in relation to Bree? Miss Cavendish recalls that Eleanor assigned Bree a tree rather than a flower, and Francine identifies it as dogwood. Its meanings include reliability, endurance, love unbroken in adversity, and rebirth. The dogwood growing over Bree’s grave suggests that Eleanor understood Bree’s death as a transformation, and the tree’s presence becomes a quiet message of hope amid grief.
4. How does the protective use of herbs and toxic plants complicate the theme of floral communication? The protective herbs and toxic plants show that the language of flowers is not only expressive but defensive. Francine scatters herbs to ward off evil, and her garden is full of poisonous plants that serve as a barrier to the unwary. This complicates the theme by showing that flowers can be used to hide, protect, and threaten, not just to communicate emotion.
5. In what way does the author’s note connect the language of flowers to the novel’s treatment of secrets? Morgan explicitly links the language of flowers to priest holes, hidden spaces built to shelter persecuted priests. Both are secret systems of communication and concealment, understood only by the initiated. The connection suggests that the Thwaite women’s floral language is a form of survival—a way to preserve truth and protect loved ones in a world where open speech is dangerous.