Tussie Mussies

A contemporary use of the historic language of flowers.

The term refers to small bouquets assembled so that individual flowers could carry coded meanings.

Hart uses floral symbolism as a second narrative layer—allowing beauty, tenderness, warning, grief, and contradiction to occupy the same image.

The Victorian tradition of “tussie mussies” revived an older practice of choosing flowers for symbolic meaning and arranging them as messages.