Say it with flowers

That used to be enough. But now it seems that people want the message written on the petals.

Flowers have been used for long for expression, but do we need to write on them to make them more meaningful? Galen Clarke / The National

The UAE's first rose-printing service is now available, as The National reported yesterday, which allows us to have personalised messages embossed onto the delicate petals. It's an interesting innovation considering that flowers have always been held to have a language all their own. Sending someone a dozen long-stemmed red roses for instance, proclaims"I love you" for all the world to hear.

Would the message become more obvious if it were written onto the rose petals? Hard to say but it’s certainly a fact that decoding the language of flowers is an art form. And a somewhat lost art at that. In Victorian times, certain flowers had fairly precise meanings. Orange blossom denoted purity, daisies meant loyalty, cyclamen said good bye and daffodils shouted unrequited love.

In a sense, the language of flowers meant you could really, as the phrase goes, say it with flowers. Now, we seem to want to say it on the flowers.