Flowers in Society Role, Importance, and Symbols

Lebanon is blessed with a rich and diverse flora, and the distance varies between flowers and people in Lebanon. We find some varieties that still adorn the plains and valleys from afar, while others are of interest to the Lebanese and are planted in their gardens either for treatment and food or for aesthetic purposes. Cultural anthropology has been interested in studying the relationship between humans and plants through a special cognitive discipline called ethnobotany. Through this discipline, we can study flowers in society, where special relationships arose between humans and flowers. They adopted them in social life, gave them various symbolic meanings, and exchanged them on various occasions, used them in economy, incorporated them in popular culture, and this gave the flowers a role and function in society. Humans consider flowers to have their language, where each flower has a specific symbol. The red rose is associated with love and the yellow with jealousy, and so on… Symbols are used to link active social elements together, through various means of communication that they put at their disposal. We can say that flowers are one of the means of communication that connect people. A group of people are interested in flowers and knowing their symbolic meanings more than other groups in society. Cultural openness has led to a new distribution of flowers, where their use has varied from the past, the types of flowers used have changed, and the shape of the bouquet has also changed, all in line with the requirements of the era. This research paper aims to demonstrate the meanings, symbols, and effects of flowers in society, how their types change between different occasions and generations, and show the differences between types of flowers among social classes, where the terms as