As well as being loved for their beauty and fragrance, flowers have also been used to symbolize ideas, messages, and feelings—never more so than when the meanings of flowers preoccupied Victorian ladies and gentlemen as a way to send coded sentiments, from anemones (meaning "forsaken") and lilies (purity) to peonies (shame) and violets (watchful). This lovely album pairs more than 80 botanical illustrations and floral paintings with poetry and prose extracts about flowers from great writers of the Victorian era and before, including Emily Brontë, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Cowper, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Keats, William Shakespeare, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and William Wordsworth.