In 1884 a London printer put out a flower book that quietly handed December the word egotism. Every birth month flower drawing on this page comes out of that tradition, and most of it is stranger than you expect.
Now draw it again, slower. The second one is better. It always is.
Nobody is born knowing their own flower. Most people meet theirs on a gift tag. (I met mine on a tea towel, which is not the origin story I would have picked.)
So these are not sorted by month. They are sorted by the evening you are actually having.
Print the chart first. Find your month. Draw the one sitting next to it.
Download the free birth flower chart →
The chart holds every month of the year. Both flowers are listed where there are two. November gets one, and it has never needed a second.
Each row also names the shapes that flower is built from. That is the part the gift tags leave out.
Pin it up somewhere. Everyone in the house will want theirs looked up. (This is the one drawing request I have never minded.)
The idea is Roman. The meanings are Victorian. Romans brought flowers to a birthday, and the Victorians gave each flower a sentence and printed it.
Which makes the drawing easier, not harder. You are not drawing a flower. You are drawing somebody’s flower. They will ask you why that one.
Most of the 23 are flowers nobody has drawn before. A few are genuinely awkward. That is exactly what a step-by-step sheet is for.
The Collection
MODERN BOTANICAL ART — bat flowers, passionflowers, and one lily that looks alight.
For the evening a birthday has crept up and the shops have shut. Each sheet breaks one flower into 3 moves. What you get: 32 flowers nobody else is drawing, and a card that took 20 minutes.
Now the groups. Find the evening you are in, and start there.
What is my birth month flower, and why has nobody ever told me?
There are 23 flowers across the year. Most months carry two, and you may use either one.
January is carnation and snowdrop. February is violet and iris. March is daffodil and jonquil. April is daisy and sweet pea.
May is lily of the valley and hawthorn. June is rose and honeysuckle. July is delphinium and water lily. August is gladiolus and poppy.
September is aster and morning glory. October is marigold and cosmos. November is chrysanthemum, alone. December is holly and narcissus.
Nobody tells you because no single authority does the telling. Florists and almanacs assembled these lists over about 200 years.
(I have compared 4 of them. They agree on roughly 19 flowers. They quietly disagree about the rest, which is reassuring if you have ever drawn the wrong one.)
Pick either flower for your month. Neither is more correct.
The board above is one flower a night. The early ones are hesitant. The late ones are not. Nothing happened in between except repetition.
That is the whole method. Draw one, then draw it again on the same page.
Which birth month flower drawing can I finish before Thursday?
This is the card group. A birthday has crept up, the shops shut at 5, and the post goes tomorrow.
These 8 are built from the fewest shapes. Each is a card in under 20 minutes.
Kate Greenaway built a career on that exact constraint. Her Language of Flowers came out in 1884, printed by Edmund Evans for George Routledge. The original drawings are barely bigger than a postcard, at 197mm by 118mm.
Small was the point. A large one reads as an attempt.
A small flower on a card reads as deliberate.
So draw these at coin size, not palm size. The meaning does the work the scale would have needed.
A snowdrop is 3 petals hanging off a bent stalk. Draw the bend first. Drawn upright, it stops being a snowdrop. A daisy is one dot and a ring of thin petals. Leave the gaps uneven. Even petals read as a wheel.
A sweet pea is two frills and one curling tendril. The tendril is what sells it. A violet has 5 rounded petals, 2 up and 3 hanging down. Make them unequal, or it turns into a pansy.
A daffodil is a cup sitting on a star. The cup goes first. A jonquil is that same cup made smaller, several to one stem.
The matrix shows one flower, three ways: outline, pattern, solid. Pick a lane before the pen moves, not halfway down the petal.
A poppy is 4 crumpled petals round a dark middle. Smooth edges ruin it faster than anything else here. A holly sprig is one spiked leaf and 3 berries. Count the spikes down one side, so the leaf stays a leaf.
I posted a carnation to somebody born in April for 2 years running. Nobody said a word. (April is a daisy. I have a chart on the wall now.)
What do I draw for somebody whose month is nearly over?
This is the keepsake group. The month is going, you noticed in time, and the drawing gets to be slower.
Walter Crane answered this in 1889. Flora’s Feast, published by Cassell, turned the seasons into a procession of flowers with postures. And the tiger lilies may turn into tigers, but they are still drawn as botanically correct tiger lilies.
That is the move worth stealing. Give the flower a posture. Keep the botany honest.
The same flower standing to attention is a diagram.
A flower leaning, opening or bowing is a keepsake.
A carnation is a fan of zigzag edges packed into a tight cup. Draw the cup and fill it. Never draw separate petals. An iris has 3 petals falling and 3 standing, and the falling ones go down first.
Lily of the valley is small bells hung along an arch. The arch has to exist before any bell does. Hawthorn is flat 5-petalled flowers in loose clusters, with the thorns added last.
Honeysuckle is long tubes flaring out from one point, like a small firework caught halfway. A morning glory is a trumpet, and it only works drawn from the side.
The blueprint above is my layout for birth flower cards. The flower sits high, the month small, the meaning smaller still.
Cosmos has 8 notched petals on a stem like thread. That thinness is the whole character. A narcissus is the daffodil cup gone shallow, with the petals swept back.
I spent a fortnight bowing every flower I drew. (They all looked apologetic. A posture is a lean, not a collapse.)
How do I make my own birth month flower drawing feel finished?
This is your own month, drawn properly, probably for the first time.
These 7 are the large ones. They reward an evening rather than 20 minutes.
Marianne North answered the finishing question by refusing to isolate anything. She made 832 paintings in 13 years across 16 countries. She painted each plant where it grew, and she paid for the gallery herself.
Her plants sit in their own surroundings.
Ours float on white paper, which is why ours look unfinished.
So draw one leaf, one bud and one stem going out of frame. That is all “finished” has ever meant.
A rose starts as a spiral, then cupped petals working outwards. The spiral goes down before anything else. A delphinium is a spire of small flowers, densest at the bottom, thinning as it climbs.
A water lily is a cup of pointed petals resting on one flat pad. The pad stops it floating in space. A gladiolus is a stalk with open flowers low and tight buds on top.
An aster is many thin petals round a small dark centre. Draw the centre first, or the petals wander.
A marigold is a ball of tight ruffles, built from the outside in. A chrysanthemum is the same idea with the petals curling inwards. The trick is to stop about 30 petals before you want to.
I added a background to my own birth month flower drawing once and lost the flower entirely. (One leaf. One bud. One stem leaving the page. That is the whole of it.)
Where does the meaning behind a birth month flower drawing come from?
They come from a small book that is now free to read online. It is stranger than the gift tags suggest.
Greenaway’s Language of Flowers prints a meaning for almost every flower here. Snowdrop is “Hope.” Rose is “Love.” Daisy is “Innocence.” Iris is “Message.” Lily of the valley is “Return of happiness.”
Some are blunter than anyone expects. Larkspur, which is the delphinium, is “Lightness. Levity.” Aster is “Variety. Afterthought.” Narcissus, which is December, is printed as “Egotism.”
(December has been quietly handing out egotism since 1884 and nobody has raised it.)
And 2 of the 23 are not in the book at all. Gladiolus is absent. Cosmos is absent. Both arrived on the birth flower lists later, and their meanings were written by somebody else.
I find that genuinely freeing. If 2 were assigned by a florist with an opinion, you may assign the rest.
So write the meaning on the back of the card, not the front. The flower goes on the front and says nothing. That is the point of a coded language.
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Every birth month flower drawing here is an outline waiting for a fill. By the third evening you will want better fills than you own. The Modern Botanical Art collection is 32 sheets of exactly that, built on flowers most people have never attempted.
32 step-by-step sheets of flowers most people never attempt
Draw one flower on paper tonight. When the hand knows it, put it on a card. Print the sheets, or draw them freehand.
Open the botanical collection →
Instant download · print at home
How do I use the free birth flower chart?
Print the chart full size. (The printer will offer to shrink it to the margins. Say no.)
Then use it backwards. Do not look up your own month first. Look up the person you are drawing for. Draw their flower badly on scrap, and only then start the card.
Keep the chart near the paper, not filed away. Its whole job is to be glanced at mid-drawing, when you cannot remember whether an iris falls or stands.
I keep mine taped inside a cupboard door. (It has a coffee ring on October and I am not reprinting it.)
A flower keeps an appointment it was never told about. It comes up in its own month, does the whole performance again, and waits to see who brought a pen.
“I had long dreamed of going to some tropical country to paint its peculiar vegetation on the spot in natural abundant luxuriance.”
Marianne North
Mirabelle wrote this. No training, strong opinions, many pens. Peer reviewed by a cat who identified every flower as a place to sit.
