A man came into the studio in late September asking for daffodils. Tenth anniversary. He had looked up wedding anniversary flowers, found daffodil sitting next to the number ten, and arrived ready to buy them. Daffodils are a spring bulb. Here they turn up in February and are finished by April, and no amount of wanting one in September will produce one. We ended up with something else entirely and he left happier than he came in, which is what tends to happen once the list stops being in charge.
I like the list. I just think it helps to know who wrote it.
What the Wedding Anniversary Flowers Actually Are
Carnation for the first year. Cosmos for the second, sunflower for the third, daisy for the fifth. Daffodil at ten, peony at twelve, chrysanthemum at thirteen, rose at fifteen, aster at twenty. After that it thins out to milestones: iris at twenty-five, lily at thirty, gladiolus at forty, and yellow roses with violets at fifty.
The eighteenth year has no flower at all. I find that oddly moving — a gap in the record nobody has gotten around to filling, eighteen years in, right about when a marriage stops needing to be explained to anyone.
One thing worth saying plainly, because I have had to hedge about it in this journal before: unlike birth flowers, where the British almanac lists and the American florists' lists contradict each other outright for several months of the year, the anniversary lists largely agree across both. That agreement is itself a clue. It points to a single source rather than centuries of drift.
The Jewelers Got There First
Silver at twenty-five years and gold at fifty are genuinely old, documented in Germanic countries since the 1500s. Everything underneath them is much younger. Assigning a gift to each individual year caught on in the nineteenth century — paper for one, wood for five, tin for ten. Then in 1937 the American National Retail Jeweler Association published a filled-in version: a gift for every year up to the twentieth, and every fifth year after that.
A jewelers' trade association, completing the blanks. That is the origin of most of what now gets handed down as tradition.
I don't say that to spoil it. I came to this work from film, where nearly every convention that feels ancient turns out to have been settled by someone in an office in the thirties, and knowing that has never once made the thing less beautiful. It only moves the authority. The carnation is not the first-year flower because of anything the carnation did.
Though the flower itself is old, which is the part I'd rather keep. Theophrastus named the genus Dianthus — dios, divine, and anthos, flower — and carnations have been under cultivation for something like two thousand years. Linnaeus formally described the species in 1753. A plant that has been in human hands that long has earned a first anniversary. It just wasn't assigned one until recently.
The iris at twenty-five is the one I think holds up on its own merits. The genus is named for the Greek goddess of the rainbow, and the word is simply the Greek for rainbow. Plants of the World Online accepted 310 species as of 2022. Something that spent that long learning to be every available color is a defensible thing to put in someone's hands at twenty-five years.
What I Send Instead
My working compromise is to treat the list as a starting color rather than an order form. The tenth anniversary in April can absolutely be daffodils, and it will be lovely, because that is when they are alive. The tenth anniversary in September gets the yellow and the particular brightness of a daffodil delivered by something that grew this month — and in late September, in this city, there is real range to work with. Dahlias are doing their best work. The light has gone long and amber by five, which flatters warm colors and makes cool whites look slightly ashen, so I follow the season rather than fighting it.
The other thing I'd offer: the anniversary flower list is for the first anniversary of a marriage, and almost nobody remembers what they were given for the eleventh. What people remember is whether the flowers looked like them. If one of you grew up around lilacs, that outranks any trade association.
If an anniversary is coming and you would like to look at what is actually in the buckets rather than what is on a chart, come find us — the Flower Van on Abbot Kinney most weekends, or the studio. Bring the year. We'll work backward from there.
