"I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine."
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine."
— Oberon, A Midsummer Night's Dream
An index gathering all tropes related to flowers and gardens.
Flower-related tropes:
- Alluring Flowers: Flowers whose scent is outright siren-like in its power to cloud minds.
- Battered Bouquet: Rejecting the Flowers of Romance by battering them.
- Bouquet Toss: A bride tosses her bouquet at the end of the wedding, which unmarried women try to grab.
- Caring Gardener: A well-meaning, kind-hearted tender of plants, usually associated with heroic characters.
- Cherry Blossom Girl: Characters (usually female) whose appearance, name, symbolic themes and/or attributes make references to Cherry Blossoms.
- Cherry Blossoms: Common Japanese motif for life, death, spring, love, and renewal.
- Fertile Feet: Where this person walks, plants sprout and bloom.
- Fill It with Flowers: A character wants to fill a bleak, barren place with thriving, blooming plants.
- Fleur-de-lis: A common symbol used in medieval heraldry, often to signify purity.
- Floral Theme Naming: Names that follow a theme from flowers.
- Flower from the Mountaintop: A character must climb to the top of a mountain to obtain a rare flower.
- Flower Motifs: Flowers saying something about a story's theme or someone's personality.
- Flower-Pot Drop: A flower pot falls and hits you on the head.
- Flowers of Femininity: Flower imagery are used to symbolise a character's femininity.
- Flowers of Nature: Flowers are used to symbolise a character's connection to the earth/nature.
- Flowers of Romance: Flowers in the contexts of a (usually romantic) relationship.
- Foul Flower: Flowers used as or associated with villainous characters for Subverted Innocence.
- Garden Garment: A dress made out of plants, or parts thereof.
- Garden of Love: Romance expressed in lush gardens.
- Hanahaki Disease: Unrequited love makes you cough up flower petals.
- Hope Sprouts Eternal: A sprig of plant life sprouting in bleakness to symbolize hope for the future.
- Ill-Fated Flowerbed: Fictional flowerbeds are magnets for disaster.
- Innocent Flower Girl: A sweet shy, reserved, perhaps Delicate and Sickly girl whose profession is making artificial flowers or growing real ones.
- Loves Me Not: A character does something (usually plucking flower petals) to determine whether someone loves them, alternating between saying "They love me" and "They love me not" with each turn.
- Mystical Lotus: Lotuses are symbols of mysticism or magic, or are magic themselves.
- Neglected Garden: A garden that hasn't been cared for in a long time, showing a character's depressed emotional state.
- Petal Power: A character who attacks enemies by spontaneously creating a swarm of lovely flower petals.
- Picked Flowers Are Dead: When a character feels sorry for flowers that are dead or dying from being plucked from their roots.
- The Poppy: The Commonwealth symbol of remembrance for the war dead.
- Queer Flowers: Certain flowers symbolizing homosexuality, such as lavender, violets, lilies, and green carnations.
- Red Spider Lilies of Mourning: A flower used to portray death, loss, and/or abandonment.
- Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue...: A stock, stereotypical poem or template for poems.
- Something about a Rose: Roses used for added sex appeal, sensitivity, and/or general Rule of Cool.
- Stinky Flower: A flower that smells bad.
- Sunny Sunflower Disposition: Sunflowers symbolizing energy and happiness.
- Tall Poppy Syndrome: Society is hostile and envious towards individuals who are special.
- Towering Flower: Flowers of unusually large size.
- The Tragic Rose: The usage of roses to represent a combination of beauty and tragedy.
- Trampled Underfoot: Bad character is established by stepping on something and breaking it.
- Weeding Out Imperfections: Bad guys use flowers, weeds, and other plants as metaphors for "desirable" and "undesirable" people.
