The flower language and symbolism of wintersweet

Flower Language

Flower Language 1

High moral character, arrogant, clear mind, upright character, independent and innovative.

"When deep winter comes, all flowers have died, only the wintersweet blooms alone in the snow."

Flower Language II

A kind heart and a noble mind.

Full of kindness, the wintersweet flowers are golden like wax, they welcome the frost and snow proudly, they bloom in the cold at the beginning of the year, they bloom for a long time without withering, and they bloom earlier than the plum blossoms. It is really light yellow with snow, frozen berries with frost, the fragrance is strong and clear, gorgeous but not vulgar. There was a poem praising it: "The branches are as thin as jasper, and as fragrant as broken gold." Wintersweet blooms in the cold winter. If you can buy a few branches from a flower shop, put them in a vase and place it on your desk, its fragrance will fill the room, making you feel the fragrance penetrate your bones and feel relaxed and happy. Or give it to a kind elder, which has a deeper meaning.

Flower Language Three

Loyalty, independence, perseverance, loyalty, strength, steadfastness, and nobility.

Wintersweet is a traditional precious ornamental flower and tree unique to China. There is a famous saying "I know I'm visiting the winter plum blossoms by crossing the wild pond". "Yao's Fragmentary Words" also calls wintersweet "Hanke". Wintersweet blooms before spring, the first of all flowers, especially the tiger-hoof wintersweet, which blooms in the tenth month of the lunar calendar, so it is called early wintersweet. Because wintersweet flowers bloom at the beginning of winter and bear fruit at the end of winter, it is also called winter plum.

Representative significance

Wintersweet symbolizes perseverance, tenacity, sacrifice, and the ability to endure loneliness in life. It also symbolizes the glory and success of life.

Origin of fragrance

Wintersweet is a precious flower and tree unique to China, native to the Qinling Mountains, Daba Mountains and Wudang Mountains in central China. Large areas of wild wintersweet forests have been discovered in Shennongjia, Hubei. In Liuzhuang Village, Yanling County, Henan Province, almost every household has wintersweets planted in front of and behind their houses, and the village is known as "Liujialongmei is the best in the world." Liuzhuang Village has a long history of growing wintersweets. Legend has it that wintersweet originally had no fragrant smell. The king of Yan State in the Western Zhou Dynasty (now in the northwest of Yanling, Henan) liked wintersweet flowers very much but thought they were not fragrant enough. He ordered the gardener to make the plum blossoms bloom within a certain period of time, otherwise he would be severely punished.

When they were at a loss, a hermit named Liu brought a few wintersweet rootstocks and helped graft them onto yellow plum. In the coldest months of winter, when all the flowers have withered, the wintersweet buds begin to emit a faint fragrance. The king was very pleased, the gardener was safe, and the Yanling wintersweet was able to flourish. Wintersweet is not a plum plant, the two are very distantly related. In plant taxonomy, wintersweet belongs to the family Chimonaceae, a deciduous shrub, while plum blossom belongs to the family Rosaceae. Because they bloom successively in the cold winter or early spring, and their flower shapes and scents are similar, they are often mistaken for the same species. The flowers of wintersweet are solitary on both sides of the branches, with many perianths. The inner layer is smaller and purple-red; the middle layer is larger, yellow, slightly shiny, and waxy; the outermost layer is composed of tiny scales. Sepals are similar to petals.

verse

According to Wang Shimao's "Xuepu Yushu", during the Xining period of Emperor Shenzong of Song Dynasty ( 1068-1077 ), Wang Anshi wrote a poem about Huangmei. Later, during the Yuanyou period of Emperor Zhezong of the Song Dynasty ( 1086-1094 ), the great writers Su Dongpo and Huang Tingjian named the yellow plum blossom "Wintersweet" because they saw that it looked like beeswax. They said that its "fragrance is like that of plum blossom, and it is similar to the work of women workers twisting wax, so it is called wintersweet." As a result, wintersweet became famous and flourished in the capital. Later, poets often spent a lot of time on the word "wax" in their poems about wintersweet. Such as "butterflies pick flowers and turn them into wax, and also use batik to dye flowers".

Of course, there are many poems about winter plums, such as: "Stay at the end of the world, and be attached to the beauty of nature. The winter plums are the most hateful, always being the flowers of last year.", "I heard that the wild plums are blooming behind Jun Temple, and the fragrance is so dense that they turn into a yellow like the palace. I don't intend to pick them to cover my old eyes, because I want to know that spring has come to the pond.", "Snowflakes dare not be fascinated by the true color, because the style is not plum."