Floromancy is the art of divining by flowers, herbs, and other plants, and there are several ways of practicing it. It was sort of an offshoot of a societal practice of communicating sentiments via flowers and other plants. The practice was observed in Turkey in the 1700s by two Europeans who took it back to their countries and it took off from then onward. Because societal expectations placed restrictions on how much public affection sweethearts could show each other, the ‘Language of Flowers’ was a convenient non-verbal means of communicating one’s sentiments. It was also a classy way of letting someone down easy. The Turks presumably had been practicing it long before the 1700s, but how long isn’t clear. The Language of Flowers experienced a revival of popularity in the mid-nineteenth century, when there was an effort to standardize the meanings of plants, but even so, books on the subject can vary slightly on the meaning of the same flower.