A poet, in his paraphrase on Horace, thus illustrates this custom:-- "Nay, nay, my boy, 'tis not for me This studious pomp of Eastern luxury; Give me no various garlands fine With linden twine; Nor seek where latest lingering blows The solitary rose." Not only were the guests adorned with flowers, but the waiters, drinking-cups, and room, were all profusely decorated.[1] "In short," as the author of "Flower-lore" remarks, "it would be difficult to name the occasions on which flowers were not employed; and, as almost all plants employed in making garlands had a symbolical meaning, the garland was composed in accordance with that meaning." Garlands, too, were thrown to actors on the stage, a custom which has come down to the present day in an exaggerated form.
Indeed, many of the flowers in request nowadays for ceremonial uses in our own and other countries may be traced back to this period; the symbolical meaning attached to certain plants having survived after the lapse of many centuries.

For a careful description of the flowers thus employed, we would refer the reader to two interesting papers contributed by Miss Lambert to the _Nineteenth Century_,[2] in which she has collected together in a concise form all the principal items of information on the subject in past years.

A casual perusal of these papers will suffice to show what a wonderful knowledge of botany the ancients must have possessed; and it may be doubted whether the most costly array of plants witnessed at any church festival supersedes a similar display witnessed by worshippers in the early heathen temples.
In the same way, we gain an insight into the profusion of flowers employed by heathen communities in later centuries, showing how intimately associated these have been with their various forms of worship.

Thus, the Singhalese seem to have used flowers to an almost incredible extent, and one of their old chronicles tells us how the Ruanwelle dagoba--270 feet high--was festooned with garlands from pedestal to pinnacle, till it had the appearance of one uniform bouquet.
We are further told that in the fifteenth century a certain king offered no less than 6,480,320 sweet-smelling flowers at the shrine of the tooth; and, among the regulations of the temple at Dambedenia in the thirteenth century, one prescribes that "every day an offering of 100,000 blossoms, and each day a different kind of flower," should be presented.

This is a striking instance, but only one of many.
"With regard to Greece, there are few of our trees and flowers," writes Mr.Moncure Conway,[3] "which were not cultivated in the gorgeous gardens of Epicurus, Pericles, and Pisistratus." Among the flowers chiefly used for garlands and chaplets in ceremonial rites we find the rose, violet, anemone, thyme, melilot, hyacinth, crocus, yellow lily, and yellow flowers generally.