“It was only after I learned the language of flowers that I learned how inappropriately my sisters were named. Lilac means ‘the first stirrings of love’—and yet my sister Lilac was a spinster, more comfortable in her own company than in others. Marigold was a happy, bouncy girl, though her name meant ‘despair.’ Rose meant ‘beauty,’ but she was the homeliest of us sisters.
