Heliotrope

Heliotrope is a sweetly-scented flower loaded with little purple blooms. Its name is taken from the Greek words helios (sun) and tropos (to turn), because its blossoms were supposed to turn and follow the sun as it advanced across the sky—a characteristic which all “heliotropic” plants exhibit. It grows as an annual or perennial, depending on location. Some plants can reach a height of more than four feet, but dwarf varieties are usually about 15 inches high.

Heliotrope is known for its fragrance—a combination of cherry, almond, and vanilla (wait, isn’t that cherry pie?). During the eighteenth century, plants were brought to Europe from tropical areas where they grew as perennials. It wasn’t long before the flowers adorned romantic cottage gardens, and their essence captured and bottled into perfumes. In fact, ancient Egyptians used a heliotrope ancestor as a perfume ingredient to trade with Rome and Greece.¹

As a color, the high point for shades of purple was toward the end of the nineteenth century during the Victorian era, due in part to an accidental discovery made by an 18-year-old scientist named William Perkin. In 1856, Perkin was attempting to synthesize quinine from coal tar when he produced not colorless quinine, but a bright purple liquid.² Today, William Perkin is considered one of modern science’s heroes—not because of his work with quinine, but because of a rich seam of chemistry that opened up when he accidentally created a particular shade of purple he called mauve.³ Prior to his discovery, purple had been difficult and expensive to produce—a reason the color purple was usually associated with royalty, power, and wealth.

Victorians went mad for purple. In 1880, the color heliotrope was paired with light green or apricot; later, with canary yellow, eucalyptus green, art bronze, and peacock blue—no color seemed too bright.⁴

Heliotrope’s popularity as a plant carried over to the Victorian language of flowers: it signified devotion. Because of its association with devotion, it is one of the few colors Victorian women were allowed to wear during a prescribed period of mourning the death of a loved one. Elaborate social rules determined what colors could be worn—and when—during the mourning process. Heliotrope and other soft shades of purple were allowed during the half-mourning of a relative or monarch. For widows, half-mourning was reached after wearing plain, non-reflective black dresses for two years while in deep mourning. After that time, a widow could choose to wear half-mourning for at least six months; she could also choose to wear it the rest of her life.

In Season 1 of the PBS series, Downton Abbey, Maggie Smith as Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, wears costumes in shades of purple, not because her name is Violet, but because she is in half-mourning for her relatives lost in the sinking of the Titanic. Though it is now 1912, the Edwardian period, Violet Crawley resists changes to tradition and clings to the strict rules of Victorian mourning dress.

In literature, heliotrope has appeared in the works of J.K. Rowling, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, and P.G. Wodehouse. In Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, Mrs. Cheveley makes her entrance wearing heliotrope and diamonds, “swashbuckling her way through the remainder of the play and commandeering all the best lines.”⁵

Your leather furniture in beautiful Turncoat Heliotrope is certain to commandeer the entire room.