If a bouquet of flowers arrives at our door, we’re more interested in who sent them. The Victorians were more concerned with what it meant.The Victorian language of flowers, also known as floriography, was a way to send messages using specific plants and flowers. Combining different flowers allowed them to send more complex or sophisticated messages.Let’s look at how this language developed and how to use it.
Mark Norman explores the folklore of bees and beekeeping in his new book, ‘Telling the Bees and Other Customs: The Folklore of Rural Crafts’.
The superstition of ‘touch wood’, or ‘knock on wood’ is still common today, but what was its original source? Madeleine D’Este explores some possibilities.
Easter customs of old were many and varied but who would have expected so many of them to be nothing short of violent? Some believe Easter is named after the pagan spring festival celebrating Ēostre or Ostara; historically known as the spring equinox, this might explain why the date of Easter is calculated by the cycles of the moon. It falls on the Sunday following the full moon after the first day of spring — nothing Christian about that calculation! One would have thought the dates of Christ’s death and resurrection would have been more definitely commemorated but, no, we stick to celebrating the coming of spring. Compared to this oddity, some of the bizarre customs associated with Easter stop seeming so bizarre. The violence involved in some of them, though, is a little harder to explain…
The final article in the series exploring common superstitions is ‘fingers crossed.’ Crossing your fingers is a common gesture in English speaking countries for luck or to cover up little white lies, but where does it originate from?
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