The Language of Flowers (Illustrated by Kate Greenaway)

See Kate paint.

Any relation to Peter?

You can see the entire book online here: What he's really telling you.

I wasn't really impressed with her illustrations for this book when I just paged through this.

The draftsmanship isn't really that good, and the colors (even with the fade of age accounted for) aren't really that enlivened.

I've seen illustrations for other books she did which were much better.

Is she perhaps young in her art here?

I didn't check her dates.

I think other presses and other artists produced more sensuous illustrations for this sort of book, even as early as the 1850s in America.

But certainly a collector of flower arcana would want this addition to his or her library.

I like the book for the text more, the plodding monomaniacal way it goes about cataloguing what appears to be a list of many hundreds of flowers and other species of vegetation.

It's so obsessive-compulsive.

Just like the sort of people who would be using this strange language.

Obsessed with one another.

Unable to simply say what they want to say.

Because of propriety and the native psychoticism of the American.