Please tell me how you know so much about the language of flowers. I want to learn. I want to write messages with bouquets. I’m so inspired by your brain.😍

Why thank you @tvheadedgirlfriend!  Hope this is helpful!

I’ll direct you here first.  Ildrew’s Language of Flowers and An Alphabet of Floral Emblems are you best bets out of my favs.

Although they’re harder to wade through, if you want old to the school floriography I suggest the Met’s article here, Living Arts symbolic encyclopedia of a site, and this Wikipedia article.  The last one is admittedly for the references at the bottom.

Floriography
is an ancient art, but most of what you’ll find in dictionaries is
Victorian Flower language.  I would also suggest looking into period
appropriate political and religious symbols.  Due to the minor issue of
illiteracy people in power used symbols to indicate everyone from the
apostles to the local liege.  Best of luck!

I saw that flower language post and was wondering, where did you find out all of that? I’ve been trying to find the most accurate flower dictionary, but none of them have everything that you said.

That can be frustrating, @blue-r4ven,  I use some dictionaries from the 1800s from a couple of archive sites.  If you can’t find what you’re looking for let me know and I can poke around my bookmarks some more.

I’ll direct you here first.  Ildrew’s Language of Flowers and An Alphabet of Floral Emblems are you best bets out of my favs.

Although they’re harder to wade through, if you want old to the school floriography I suggest the Met’s article here, Living Arts symbolic encyclopedia of a site, and this Wikipedia article.  The last one is admittedly for the references at the bottom.

Floriography
is an ancient art, but most of what you’ll find in dictionaries is
Victorian Flower language.  I would also suggest looking into period
appropriate political and religious symbols.  Due to the minor issue of
illiteracy people in power used symbols to indicate everyone from the
apostles to the local liege.  Best of luck!

I hope this doesn’t seem weird, but I saw a post you contributed to about Victorian flower language, and I was wondering if there were any particular books/references that helped you learn. I’m fascinated by the language of flowers and I’d love to learn more!

It’s not weird at all, @oldsouldier!  Learn away!

I’ll direct you here first.  Ildrew’s Language of Flowers and An Alphabet of Floral Emblems are you best bets out of my favs.

Although they’re harder to wade through, if you want old to the school floriography I suggest the Met’s article here, Living Arts symbolic encyclopedia of a site, and this Wikipedia article.  The last one is admittedly for the references at the bottom.

Floriography
is an ancient art, but most of what you’ll find in dictionaries is
Victorian Flower language.  I would also suggest looking into period
appropriate political and religious symbols.  Due to the minor issue of
illiteracy people in power used symbols to indicate everyone from the
apostles to the local liege.  Best of luck!

Hello there! I red your answer to the post about the flower language and the cryptic message and I was really impressed and so excited. I always wanted to get into the language of flowers and deepen the little knowledge I’ve already acquired. Could you help me out there? How did you learn? Do you ave any books to recommend? I’d love to hear back from you. ~ Neleh

Hello @nelehgrimm!  I learned mostly through curiosity and poking around a lot of lovely old archives whenever my parents were researching.  The best way to gain knowledge of old school stuff is by poking around and reading everything you can get your hands on.  Like most languages and art forms, don’t let yourself get hung up on the idea there’s a single answer to things.  Just try to find the best answer based on the collection of knowledge available.  Best of luck!

I’ll direct you here first.  Ildrew’s Language of Flowers and An Alphabet of Floral Emblems are you best bets out of my favs.

Although they’re harder to wade through, if you want old to the school floriography I suggest the Met’s article here, Living Arts symbolic encyclopedia of a site, and this Wikipedia article.  The last one is admittedly for the references at the bottom.

Floriography
is an ancient art, but most of what you’ll find in dictionaries is
Victorian Flower language.  I would also suggest looking into period
appropriate political and religious symbols.  Due to the minor issue of
illiteracy people in power used symbols to indicate everyone from the
apostles to the local liege.  Best of luck!

Can I ask your thoughts on The Six Thatchers?

@brightnessrandom  There were several things in it I liked, the interaction between Mycroft and Sherlock, the little details like the mirrors, and the story telling techniques like the constant parallels. A lot of it was very odd though. Half done and very fake feeling – very different from the feeling of the Doyle stories, or from Sherlock.

There’s a lot of great stuff out already about how Sherlock was obviously telling a lot of the story and how he has proven himself an unreliable narrator before. There’s also a fan theory going around that John shot Mary – which I think is very possible. There’s also a fan theory that Mrs. Norbury symbolizes John, but I think its far more likely that she’s a red herring entirely, and that if she isn’t that she symbolizes Sherlock.

It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever seen even if you want to assume everything happened as told, there was good acting and good moments in it. From a critical standpoint though, even if they were being very clever and it was all a carefully crafted frame story, so much of the audience shouldn’t have felt so unmoored.

The strength of the Doyle stories was that they were capable of standing on their own or as a canon because of their serial nature. Likewise BBC Sherlock is designed to essentially be a series of movies though stricter than the Bond franchise. What this means as far as narrative choice is that the episodes can and should interact with each other as far as story goes as well as enrich each other, but they shouldn’t be dependent. In other words, anyone should be able to pick up a random episode and understand what’s happening without ever having seen any of the other episodes.

So far all of the Sherlock episodes have been able to manage that, but very quickly it became obvious that Six Thatchers couldn’t. If the story happened as told the characters and story telling was not sufficiently in character to represent the series. If the story was an unreliable frame story than it could only be recognized as such by someone who’d viewed other episodes. Also, if it was a false story, that is entirely meaningless outside of the context of why which one would need the other episodes to know.

So an episode which depends on more information to determine its quality – which is a bit telling in and of itself, and which deviates from its genre format at its peril, but which had some fun moments.

Having read your wee doctor series for the 5th, 6th time? I had to just. Send you a message. Your writing is just SO good, the details you hide in the background, the way the characters tug at each other. The secrets they keep. I love it. Thanks.

Thank you so much!  That means a lot!  I don’t know how to say I put a lot of work into it without sounding like I’m humble bragging, but I really appreciate it when people notice the work that went into it.  Thank you for being so awesome!