What are the flower language and symbolic meanings of wintersweet?
Wintersweet is a traditional precious ornamental flower native to China, with a long history of cultivation and a rich wintersweet culture. Because wintersweet blooms at the beginning of winter and bears fruit as winter ends, accompanying the winter season, it is also known as winter plum. It blooms before spring, ahead of all other flowers. Plum blossoms have always been regarded as a symbol of strength and pride. So what is the flower language of wintersweet? Let us take a look below!
The flower language of wintersweet
A compassionate heart filled with sorrow and grief, a noble soul, faithful, independent, resolute, loyal, strong, steadfast, faithful and loyal, pure and noble, lofty integrity, proud and commanding, a clear and limpid heart, noble spirit, independent and innovative.
Ancient poets often compared winter plum blossoms with snow, which shows that plum blossoms were already regarded by the ancients as unafraid of the cold. Plum blossoms have always been considered a symbol of strength and pride. The Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin called wintersweet "cold plum," with the line "knowing to visit the cold plum, I cross the wild pond." Wang Anshi's poem "Plum" is even more widely known.
The benefits of wintersweet
Wintersweet blooms in the cold months of early spring, with yellow flowers like wax and a delicate fragrance spreading all around. It is an excellent ornamental plant for winter and a precious ornamental flower unique to China. In addition, wintersweet also has good dietary and medicinal value. Generally, dried flower buds are used for consumption. The dried flower buds are round, rectangular or obovate in shape, 1 to 1.5 cm long and about 0.4 to 0.8 cm wide. The perianth overlaps in a flower-bud shape and is brownish-yellow. The lower part is wrapped by numerous membranous scales; the scales are yellowish-brown, slightly triangular, and slightly hairy. It is fragrant in odor, slightly sweet in taste, then bitter, with a slight greasy feeling.
Li Shizhen said in the Compendium of Materia Medica: "Wintersweet flowers are sweet and slightly bitter in taste; after picking, fry them until cooked, soak and wash them clean in water, and season with oil and salt to eat." It is both a quite tasty food and can "relieve heat and promote fluid production." Its fruit was called tuba dou in ancient times; it is toxic and can be used as a purgative, but must not be eaten by mistake.
Modern pharmacological analysis shows that wintersweet flowers contain borneol, eucalyptol, linalool and other components. Traditional Chinese medicine holds that wintersweet flowers are slightly sweet, pungent and cool in nature, and have the effects of relieving summer heat and promoting fluid production, stimulating the appetite and dispersing stagnation, detoxifying and promoting tissue regeneration, and relieving cough. They are mainly used to treat summer-heat dizziness, vomiting, heat-disease restlessness and thirst, qi stagnation with gastric stuffiness, cough and other conditions. Among the people, wintersweet flowers are commonly decocted in water and given to infants to drink, as they have the effect of clearing heat and detoxifying.