Chrysanthemums: meaning in Ireland and across Europe

Chrysanthemums are an ordinary autumn gift in Ireland and an unmistakable graveyard flower in France. The same bunch, read two ways, and the difference matters if you are sending flowers to someone with a continental European household or ordering for delivery to an address abroad.

The European association is tied to All Saints' Day on 1 November, when families across France, Italy, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Austria and Croatia bring pots of chrysanthemums to family graves. Millions of plants are sold for that week alone, and the connection is strong enough that giving them at any other time reads as tactless. Nothing similar happened in Ireland or Britain, where the flower stayed a garden and supermarket staple.

What chrysanthemums mean

The older meanings are cheerful. In Chinese tradition the chrysanthemum stands for long life and is one of the four gentlemen of classical painting. In Japan it is the imperial emblem and marks a national festival, though white chrysanthemums are funeral flowers there as well. In the Victorian language of flowers a red chrysanthemum meant love and a yellow one slighted love, both quoted more often than they are used.

In Irish practice the flower means autumn, and it is common in sympathy work for the practical reason that it lasts through a week of visitors without help. Nobody in Ireland reads a chrysanthemum as a slight.

Season in Ireland

Chrysanthemums are naturally autumn flowers, triggered into bud by shortening days, and they flower in Irish gardens from September to the first hard frost. That is the true season and it is when the outdoor-grown stems appear at markets.

The shop supply is a different thing. Commercial growers manipulate day length with blackout screens, so cut chrysanthemums are available every week of the year from Dutch and Colombian glasshouses, and the price barely moves. There is no meaningful Irish commercial crop.

Pot chrysanthemums appear everywhere in September and October and are worth considering for a doorstep or a grave, where a cut bunch would be gone in a week.

When to send them, and when not to

They suit sympathy here, autumn birthdays, and any situation where the flowers need to hold up unattended. A chrysanthemum spray sent to a house in the week after a funeral is still doing its job when the callers stop, which is the point at which flowers actually help.

Do not send them to a French, Italian, Polish or Belgian household, or to an address in those countries, unless the occasion genuinely is a bereavement. Do not send them as a romantic gesture in any country, because the flower has never carried that meaning anywhere. And check the death notice on RIP.ie before sending anything at all: family flowers only means a donation is wanted instead.

Care

Cut 2cm off each stem on a slant. Older advice says to smash woody chrysanthemum stems with a hammer; do not. Crushed tissue rots and blocks the stem faster than a clean cut ever seals.

Strip the leaves back to the top third. The foliage is the source of the medicinal smell people notice and it fouls water faster than the flowers do.

Pinch out each flower as it browns. A spray chrysanthemum carries buds at several stages and removing the spent ones lets the rest open, which is the difference between ten days and three weeks.

Change the water every third day and re-cut. Keep them out of direct sun. Beyond that they ask for very little, which is the real case for the flower and the reason florists reach for it. Compare it against the rest on vase life by flower.