Easy flower trivia to open the round
These eleven are the warm-up: flowers people already have in a garden, a window box or a supermarket bouquet. Read each one aloud, allow ten seconds, and expect a high-scoring round. The point is to get everybody answering before the national flowers and the Victorian meanings arrive.
Two of them still catch people out. Baby's breath goes into more bouquets than almost any other plant and hardly anybody knows its real name, and the flower the world now treats as a Dutch icon is a wild plant of the Central Asian steppe that western Europe only met in the sixteenth century.
Q1.What kind of underground structure do tulips grow from?Tap to reveal
Answer: A bulb
A tulip bulb is a packed food store with next spring's flower already formed inside it, which is why a bulb lifted in autumn can be shipped across the world and still bloom on time.
Q2.Which continent is the common daisy, Bellis perennis, native to?Tap to reveal
Answer: Europe
Its English name is a worn-down form of "day's eye": the flower closes at dusk and opens again in the morning. It travelled with European settlement and is now a lawn weed on most continents.
Q3.Vanilla is harvested from a climbing plant in which family?Tap to reveal
Answer: The orchid family
Vanilla planifolia is the only orchid grown as a major food crop. Outside its native range it has no natural pollinator, so nearly every vanilla pod in the world is pollinated by hand, one flower at a time.
Q4.Which flower is the state flower of Kansas?Tap to reveal
Answer: The sunflower
Kansas adopted it in 1903 and calls itself the Sunflower State. The sunflower is also the emblem most associated with Ukraine, long one of the world's biggest producers of sunflower oil.
Q5.The shape of a petunia flower is usually compared to which musical instrument?Tap to reveal
Answer: A trumpet
Petunias are nightshades - close relatives of tobacco, tomatoes and chillies. The name reaches English through French from petun, a Tupi-Guarani word for tobacco.
Q6.Florists sell Gypsophila under which common name?Tap to reveal
Answer: Baby's breath
It is the filler in more bouquets than any other plant: a cloud of tiny white flowers on wiry stems. The botanical name means "chalk-loving", after the limey soils it grows on in the wild.
Q7.The garden and hedgerow plant Lonicera is better known by which name?Tap to reveal
Answer: Honeysuckle
The scent is strongest after dark because the flowers are built for night-flying moths. Japanese honeysuckle, planted as an ornamental, has become one of the most troublesome invasive vines in the eastern United States.
Q8."Lion's lips", "rabbit's mouth" and "calves' snouts" are all old names for which garden flower?Tap to reveal
Answer: The snapdragon
Squeeze the sides of the flower and the two lips open like a jaw, which is where every one of those names comes from. Bumblebees are heavy enough to force the same hinge and reach the nectar; smaller bees are not.
Q9.Wild carnations, Dianthus caryophyllus, came originally in which single colour?Tap to reveal
Answer: Pink
Every other carnation colour, including the green ones sold for St Patrick's Day, was bred or dyed later. The colour word may well come from the flower rather than the other way round - the frilled petals look pinked, or cut with shears.
Q10.Which U.S. state grows most of the cut flowers produced in the United States?Tap to reveal
Answer: California
California accounts for the large majority of domestic production, but most flowers sold in American shops are imported, chiefly from Colombia and Ecuador, where the climate allows growing all year.
Q11.Which city in Oregon is nicknamed the City of Roses?Tap to reveal
Answer: Portland
The climate suits roses well enough that Portland hosts the International Rose Test Garden, laid out during the First World War, and an annual Rose Festival.
Flower names, myths and where they came from
Flower names are a mix of Greek myth, Latin description and eighteenth-century botanists naming plants after each other. This round is about that history, and it is usually where a table starts shedding points.
The tulip question is the one worth stopping on. In the winter of 1636-37 single bulbs in the Dutch Republic changed hands for the price of a house, and the market collapsed within weeks in February 1637. Historians now think far fewer people were ruined than the legend claims, because most of the trading was in contracts that were quietly cancelled - but the episode is still the standard example of a speculative bubble.
Q1.What does the name of the iris flower mean in Greek?Tap to reveal
Answer: Rainbow
Iris was the rainbow goddess who carried messages between the gods and mortals, and the flower was named for the range of colours it comes in. In North America irises are also called flags.
Q2.In Greek myth, Zeus saved Asclepius' pupil Paeon from his teacher's jealousy by turning him into which flower?Tap to reveal
Answer: The peony
Asclepius was the god of medicine and Paeon his student, so the myth attaches the flower to healing - and peony root really was used as a medicine in Europe and China for centuries.
Q3.The hyacinth is named after a figure from which body of myth?Tap to reveal
Answer: Greek myth - Hyacinthus, a youth beloved of Apollo
Apollo killed him by accident with a discus and made a flower spring from his blood. Sparta held a festival, the Hyacinthia, in his memory.
Q4.Myosotis, the forget-me-not, means what in Greek?Tap to reveal
Answer: Mouse's ear
From mus, mouse, and otos, ear, after the small soft leaves rather than the flower. The forget-me-not is the state flower of Alaska.
Q5.The dahlia is named after whom?Tap to reveal
Answer: Anders Dahl, a Swedish botanist
The Spanish botanist Antonio Jose Cavanilles named it in 1791 for Dahl, a student of Linnaeus, who had already died two years earlier and never saw the flower that carries his name.
Q6.The gladiolus takes its name from the Latin gladius. What does that word mean?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sword
Pliny the Elder recorded the name in the first century: the leaves are flat, stiff and pointed like the short sword a Roman soldier carried. Gladiator comes from the same root.
Q7.What name is given to the collapse of the Dutch tulip bulb market in the 1630s?Tap to reveal
Answer: Tulip mania, or tulipomania
Prices peaked in the winter of 1636-37 and crashed in February 1637. It is usually called the first recorded speculative bubble, though modern historians argue the number of people actually ruined was small.
Q8.Gerbera daisies originated on which continent?Tap to reveal
Answer: Africa
The florist's gerbera is bred from Gerbera jamesonii, found in South Africa in the nineteenth century and still sometimes sold as the Transvaal daisy. It is now one of the most traded cut flowers in the world.
Q9.The tiger lily, Lilium lancifolium, shares its name with a character in which children's classic?Tap to reveal
Answer: Peter Pan
Tiger Lily appears in J. M. Barrie's 1904 play and in the novel that followed in 1911. The real plant is an East Asian lily with dark-spotted orange petals.
Q10.Soldiers carried which flower in their rifle barrels during a bloodless 1974 revolution, giving the event its name?Tap to reveal
Answer: The carnation - Portugal's Carnation Revolution
The coup of 25 April 1974 ended nearly five decades of dictatorship almost without bloodshed, and red carnations handed out in the streets of Lisbon ended up in gun barrels. Portugal still keeps the date as a public holiday.
Q11.The sharp points on a rose stem are not botanically thorns. What are they?Tap to reveal
Answer: Prickles
A true thorn is a modified stem or branch, as on a hawthorn. A rose's prickles are outgrowths of the outer layer of the stem only, which is why they snap off cleanly and a real thorn does not.
Q12.The Rose Valley around the town of Kazanlak makes which country a leading producer of rose oil?Tap to reveal
Answer: Bulgaria
The valley grows Rosa damascena for attar of roses, and it takes thousands of kilograms of petals to distil a single kilogram of oil, which is why rose oil is priced like a precious metal. Turkey is the other large producer.
National and state flowers around the world
Twelve questions, and this is the round that decides quizzes: most players know two or three of these and guess the rest. Where a country has never legislated on the subject, the flower is simply the one it puts on stamps, coins and tourist posters.
Worth settling before the arguing starts: some of these rest on a law or a decree and some on nothing but habit. Nepal's rhododendron is named in the constitution, Venezuela's orchid by a decree of 1951 and Mexico's dahlia by one of 1963. India's lotus is a government listing rather than an act. South Korea's mugunghwa has never actually been legislated - it is custom, reinforced by the national anthem and the presidential seal. Switzerland's edelweiss and England's rose are tradition too.
Q1.Which mountain flower is the traditional national flower of both Switzerland and Austria?Tap to reveal
Answer: Edelweiss
The German name means "noble white". Its botanical name, Leontopodium, means "lion's paw", a fair description of the woolly white bracts - which are not petals at all, but modified leaves shielding the tiny real flowers.
Q2.The mugunghwa, national flower of which country, is a hibiscus?Tap to reveal
Answer: South Korea
Hibiscus syriacus, the rose of Sharon, appears in the South Korean national anthem and in the emblem of the presidency. The Korean name carries the sense of a blossom that never fades.
Q3.Which flower, from a family of tens of thousands of species, is the national flower of Venezuela?Tap to reveal
Answer: The orchid
Venezuela chose Cattleya mossiae, the flor de mayo, in 1951. The orchid family is either the largest or the second largest family of flowering plants on earth, depending on whose species count you accept - the daisy family is its only rival.
Q4.Which flower, grown by the Aztecs long before Europeans arrived, is the national flower of Mexico?Tap to reveal
Answer: The dahlia
Mexico declared it in 1963. The Aztecs grew dahlias for food and used the hollow stems of one tree-sized species as pipes. Older quiz books pair Mexico with Colombia here, which is wrong: Colombia's national flower is an orchid.
Q5.The tulip is native to Central Asia and reached Europe through the Ottoman court. In which country does the red tulip stand for a martyr's blood, appearing on monuments, murals and stamps?Tap to reveal
Answer: Iran
In Persian poetry and in modern Iranian iconography the red tulip is the martyr's flower. The tulip is claimed as an emblem in several countries along its native range, Turkey among them, and by custom in the Netherlands, which imported it from the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century - so a table may fairly argue this one.
Q6.Which flower, whose Greek name means "rose tree", is the national flower of Nepal?Tap to reveal
Answer: The rhododendron
Nepal's is Rhododendron arboreum, the lali gurans, which grows as a full tree on the middle slopes of the Himalaya and flowers deep red in spring.
Q7.Which aquatic flower, sacred in both Hinduism and Buddhism, is the national flower of India?Tap to reveal
Answer: The lotus
Nelumbo nucifera is often called the sacred water lily, but it is not a water lily: the two belong to unrelated families and only look alike. Its leaves, seeds and roots are all eaten.
Q8.Which three-leaved plant is Ireland's national plant emblem?Tap to reveal
Answer: The shamrock
Tradition has St Patrick using its three leaves to explain the Trinity. Ireland's official state emblem is in fact the harp - the shamrock is the plant everyone reaches for instead.
Q9.Which spring flower, also called the narcissus, is a national emblem of Wales?Tap to reveal
Answer: The daffodil
Wales has two emblems, the daffodil and the leek, and both are worn on St David's Day, 1 March, which is roughly when Welsh daffodils open. Daffodils flower in spring, not autumn, whatever older quiz books claim.
Q10.Which small blue field flower, long treated as a cornfield weed, is the national flower of Estonia?Tap to reveal
Answer: The cornflower
Estonia adopted it in 1968, while still under Soviet rule, and it doubles as an Estonian party symbol. Farm herbicides have made the wild plant genuinely scarce across much of western Europe.
Q11.Which flower is the national flower of England?Tap to reveal
Answer: The rose
It has been an English emblem since the Wars of the Roses, and the Tudor rose fused the white rose of York with the red of Lancaster. The rose is also the national floral emblem of the United States, named by Congress in 1986.
Q12.The Cherokee rose is the state flower of Georgia. Where is it actually native?Tap to reveal
Answer: China - it is Rosa laevigata, an East Asian species
It had naturalized across the American South long before anyone chose it as an emblem, and its link to the Cherokee and the Trail of Tears is a later tradition. Several U.S. state flowers are introduced plants rather than natives.
Flowers as medicine, food and poison
Eight questions on flowers that do something besides look pleasant, and on several that are dangerous. None of this is medical advice - it is the history of how these plants have been used, plus two warnings worth passing on at the table.
Those two are genuinely useful. Lilies can kill a cat: a few licked petals or pollen groomed off the fur are enough, and treatment has to start within hours. And daffodil bulbs get mistaken for onions often enough that food-safety bodies have warned shops not to display them next to produce.
Q1.Daffodil bulbs contain which toxic alkaloid, the reason people are poisoned after mistaking them for onions?Tap to reveal
Answer: Lycorine
Lycorine runs through the whole Narcissus plant and is most concentrated in the bulb. It usually causes violent vomiting rather than lasting harm, but it is why a daffodil bulb in a bag of onions is a real hazard.
Q2.Lilies cause acute kidney failure in which common pet?Tap to reveal
Answer: Cats
True lilies and daylilies are both dangerous, and pollen brushed onto the fur and then groomed off can be enough. Dogs get an upset stomach from the same plants; cats lose kidney function.
Q3.Snowdrops gave chemists galantamine, a drug licensed to treat which disease?Tap to reveal
Answer: Alzheimer's disease
Galantamine was first isolated from snowdrops and their relatives and is now made synthetically. It eases symptoms in mild to moderate Alzheimer's; it does not halt the disease.
Q4.Pot marigold, Calendula officinalis, has been used for centuries for which medicinal property?Tap to reveal
Answer: Anti-inflammatory - a traditional remedy for inflamed skin
Calendula is not the same plant as the French and African marigolds on garden-centre benches, which are Tagetes. Calendula petals are edible too, and were used as a cheap stand-in for saffron colouring.
Q5.Violet flowers and leaves are eaten as a source of which two vitamins?Tap to reveal
Answer: Vitamins A and C
Viola leaves carry a surprising amount of vitamin C for a leaf. The flowers are crystallized for cake decoration or steeped for violet syrup, and both flowers and leaves of garden violets and pansies are edible.
Q6.Rose hips, the fruit left behind after the petals fall, are unusually rich in which vitamin?Tap to reveal
Answer: Vitamin C
British children were sent out to gather rose hips for syrup during the Second World War, when imported citrus stopped arriving. The hips of the wild dog rose are among the richest common sources.
Q7.How long does the flower of most passionflower species last?Tap to reveal
Answer: About one day
The flower opens, is pollinated and collapses within a day, which is why a vine can be covered in blooms one morning and bare the next. Spanish missionaries in South America read the parts of the flower as symbols of the Passion of Christ, and the name stuck.
Q8.Rosa gallica, grown for centuries in monastery and pharmacy gardens, is native to which continent?Tap to reveal
Answer: Europe
It is still called the Apothecary's Rose. Those gardens grew it for conserves and rose water, and it is one of the parent species behind most old garden roses.
The language of flowers: what each bloom means
Floriography - giving every flower a message - was a Victorian craze built on French flower dictionaries, the best known being Charlotte de Latour's of 1819 and Kate Greenaway's illustrated Language of Flowers of 1884. The lists never fully agreed with one another, which is worth saying out loud before the arguing starts.
Sixteen questions, and the meanings below are the ones the standard Victorian lists give - where those lists disagree, the answer says so and names the version each side used. Some still shape what florists sell - white lilies at funerals, red roses in February - and some have quietly reversed: a yellow tulip meant hopeless love to a Victorian and means cheerful sunshine on a card today.
Q1.In art and literature, which trio of states does the poppy traditionally stand for?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sleep, death and oblivion
The opium poppy is Papaver somniferum - literally sleep-bringing - and in classical art poppies belong to the gods of sleep and death. The remembrance poppy is a separate, twentieth-century meaning that grew out of the First World War battlefields in Flanders.
Q2.Which herb has meant remembrance since long before the Victorians?Tap to reveal
Answer: Rosemary
Ophelia says "There's rosemary, that's for remembrance" in Hamlet, and rosemary was carried at both funerals and weddings. The name has nothing to do with roses or Mary: it comes from Latin ros marinus, dew of the sea. Botanists have since moved the plant into the sage genus, Salvia.
Q3.What does a blue rose mean in the language of flowers?Tap to reveal
Answer: Mystery, and the pursuit of the impossible
The meaning exists because the flower does not: roses cannot make the blue pigment delphinidin, so a florist's blue rose is a dyed white one. A genetically engineered rose carrying delphinidin did reach the market, and it came out mauve.
Q4.What message does a rose with no thorns send?Tap to reveal
Answer: Love at first sight
Kate Greenaway's 1884 list gives a thornless rose 'early attachment'; later lists shifted it to love at first sight, and that is the reading that stuck. Florists still strip stems, though for handling rather than romance.
Q5.What does a red tulip declare?Tap to reveal
Answer: Love - it is a declaration of love
Tulips reached Europe from the Ottoman court, where they already carried romantic weight in poetry, and red kept it. It is the one tulip colour whose Victorian meaning modern florists still use unchanged.
Q6.And a yellow tulip?Tap to reveal
Answer: Hopeless love
Victorian lists read yellow as jealousy or rejection across several flowers. Modern florists sell yellow tulips as cheerfulness and friendship, so this meaning has genuinely flipped - a useful warning against treating any flower dictionary as fixed.
Q7.What does a white lily symbolize?Tap to reveal
Answer: Purity
Christian painting gives the Madonna lily to the Virgin Mary in Annunciation scenes, which is where the association comes from, and it is why white lilies remain the standard funeral flower across much of Europe and North America.
Q8.What does the lily of the valley stand for?Tap to reveal
Answer: The return of happiness
The standard lists give it that one meaning. It has a devout side too, with old names like Our Lady's tears, and in France sprigs of muguet are given on 1 May. The plant itself is seriously poisonous, which the sentiment never mentions.
Q9.What does a blue violet mean?Tap to reveal
Answer: Faithfulness
The Victorian lists split the genus: the blue violet is faithfulness, while the sweet violet - early, low down and half hidden by leaves - is modesty. Napoleon took the violet as a personal emblem, and his supporters wore it as a quiet badge while he was in exile.
Q10.What does lavender mean in the standard Victorian flower dictionaries?Tap to reveal
Answer: Distrust
Kate Greenaway's 1884 list gives lavender one word: distrust. Modern florists sell it as devotion and calm, so this is another meaning that has flipped completely. Lavender belongs to the mint family, and the dried flowers were laid in linen chests long before anyone assigned them a message.
Q11.What does purple lilac mean?Tap to reveal
Answer: First love
White lilac was given the narrower meaning of youthful innocence. Lilacs belong to the olive family and flower for only a couple of weeks in late spring, and that brevity is part of why they came to stand for something young.
Q12.What message does honeysuckle carry?Tap to reveal
Answer: Devoted affection
The lists sometimes phrase it as the bonds of love, after the way the vine winds tightly around whatever it climbs. The night-time scent is the flower's own devotion - to the moths that pollinate it.
Q13.What does the marigold symbolize in the Victorian lists?Tap to reveal
Answer: Grief
Tagetes marigolds are native to the Americas, and in Mexico the cempasuchil is the flower of the Day of the Dead, heaped on graves and altars to guide the dead home. A European sentiment and a Mexican tradition landed on the same association independently.
Q14.In Celtic symbolism, which quality does the thistle stand for?Tap to reveal
Answer: Nobility
The Order of the Thistle is the senior order of chivalry in Scotland, and the plant has been a royal Scottish emblem since the fifteenth century. The Victorian dictionaries read it differently again - Greenaway gives the common thistle 'austerity' - and it is the spines that earned it either meaning, not the flower.
Q15.What does the dandelion mean in the language of flowers?Tap to reveal
Answer: Coquetry
The lists disagree: many give the dandelion coquetry, while Greenaway's gives 'rustic oracle', after blowing the seed head to ask a question. The name is a worn-down form of the French dent de lion, lion's tooth, after the jagged leaves, and every part of the plant is edible.
Q16.Which cluster of meanings does the daisy carry?Tap to reveal
Answer: Innocence, simplicity, cheerfulness and loyal love
The daisy is the flower Victorian lists give to children and to new mothers, and "he loves me, he loves me not" is played with a daisy for the same reason.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many flower trivia questions are on this page?
There are 59, split across five rounds: easy garden and bouquet flowers, flower names and myths, national and state flowers, flowers used as medicine and poison, and the language of flowers.
What is the language of flowers?
Floriography is the Victorian practice of assigning a message to each flower, so a bouquet could be read as a note. It was popularised by French flower dictionaries from 1819 onward and by Kate Greenaway's illustrated Language of Flowers in 1884. The dictionaries often disagreed, so more than one meaning can be correct for the same bloom, so where the lists disagree, the answer here says so and names the version each side used.
Which of these flower questions work best with children?
Rounds one and three. The easy round covers flowers children can point at in a garden, and the national flowers round works well as a map game. The medicine and poison round is fine for older children and doubles as a safety lesson about not eating what you find.
Are any of the flowers on this page dangerous?
Yes, and three are worth knowing about. Lilies and daylilies cause kidney failure in cats, including from pollen groomed off the fur. Daffodil bulbs contain lycorine and are poisonous if mistaken for onions. Lily of the valley is toxic in every part. Wash your hands after handling cut flowers and do not eat any flower unless you are certain what it is.
Can I use these flower trivia questions for free?
Yes. Read them aloud, print them or paste them into a slide deck for a classroom, a garden club, an office or a pub quiz at no cost. You can also build the same set into a live multiplayer quiz on Trivio.NET and let people join from their phones.
