Lettuce – The Daily Flower for 20 March

Paper money, a lack of intimacy and mild opiates are not the kind of thing you'd usually think to find lurking quietly in the garden. But gardens are full of surprises – especially ones in which you find Lactuca sativa growing.

Yes, the humble lettuce: slang for cash, floriographic connoter of cold-heartedness and producer of the milky substance lactucarium, a.k.a. lettuce opium. And you thought all the Asteraceaes were fresh-faced as daisies? The similarity between the cultivated lettuce and the rest of its botanical family seem, on the surface of it at any rate, to stop at its clusters of butter-coloured dandelion-like flowers.

Bolting lettuce by Charles & Clint

Putting the money (lettuce?) in the lettuce by Mussels

Good for giving to: Frigid seekers of salad days.

Great lettuces in literature: Perhaps Jelila Jamb would be a good match for the Tin Man:

At this moment the soldier returned leading a young girl by the hand. She seemed very sweet and modest, having a pretty face and beautiful green eyes and hair. A dainty green silk skirt reached to her knees, showing silk stockings embroidered with pea-pods, and green satin slippers with bunches of lettuce for decorations instead of bows or buckles.

From The Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum

Tags: flowers, lettuce, Lactuca sativa, floriography