By Carina Magyar in Flowers — Apr 26, 2023

VII: Lily-of-the-valley

How a flower merged with Labor Day.

The maybells of glovewort. Photo by Mike Lerley / Unsplash

Good morning. Today is septidi, the 7th of Floréal, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate le muguet, a stalk of bell-shaped flowers.

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Christian Dior believed this flower was a talisman of luck. He tied a sprig to his lapel year-round – expensive, given lily-of-the-valley's insistence in only blooming briefly at this time of year – believing its presence, scent, and beauty helped propel him to the fame and fortune he had in the fashion world. While they smell beautiful, the flower resists enfleurage, so the smell cannot be captured from its natural source. Making a perfume with lily-of-the-valley was an obsession until his parfumier Edmond Roudnitska finally created a compound using hydroxycitronellal to closely approximate the scent in CLXIV (1956), and muguet was born, now a common floral ingredient.

This flower should really fall on a primidi. In France, the lily-of-the-valley is so closely tied to the Roman calendar date of May 1st that it's as immutable as Halloween, a springtime ritual that celebrates "the first" and luck and desires for the coming year. It's a ritual that has only grown in the centuries since the French Revolution, to the point that any new would-be calendar reformer would be wise to consider starting the whole year off with a day dedicated to the flower.

Every year on the first of May, French people all over the country buy and give each other sprigs of lily-of-the-valley to smell and to wear. The tradition is so powerful that is supersedes Parisian bans on selling flowers on the sidewalk, and has a special exemption from taxation that even the EU wouldn't dare crack down upon.

But I'm sure it was scuttled to an anonymous septidi because the whole tradition dates back to a king.

VII: Lily-of-the-valley

VI: Columbine

VIII: Mushroom

VI: Columbine

VIII: Mushroom

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