Easter Flowers and Their Meanings

Easter falls in spring, and its flowers are spring flowers: daffodils, tulips, lilies, and the willow catkins that precede them. The association between Easter and fresh flowers is both ancient and instinctive: this is the season of resurrection in the natural world, the moment when the year turns from cold to warmth, from brown to green, from death to flowering life. The religious symbolism of Easter maps onto the natural symbolism of spring with a completeness that no other season quite replicates.

The Easter lily

The Easter lily, specifically Lilium longiflorum, has been the signature Easter flower in Christian tradition since at least the nineteenth century, when its pure white trumpets came to represent purity, resurrection, and new life. In Britain, white lilies appear in churches from Good Friday through Easter Sunday, often alongside white roses and white narcissus. The association between white flowers and Easter Sunday specifically is so strong that many florists report white as their dominant Easter colour even when buyers have not consciously decided on it.

Daffodils and narcissus

In Britain, the daffodil is perhaps the more characteristic Easter flower: it coincides reliably with the Easter period regardless of when the moveable feast falls, it is abundantly grown in Britain, and its yellow-gold colour is associated with both spring sunshine and resurrection. The Welsh daffodil, celebrated on St David's Day in March, is the same flower that fills British gardens and florists throughout the Easter period. Narcissus, particularly the highly fragrant Paperwhite and Jonquil varieties, adds an olfactory dimension to Easter arrangements that lilies alone cannot provide.

“Easter's flowers are spring's flowers, and spring's message has always been the same: after the longest wait, things bloom again.”

Willow and catkin: the pre-Easter tradition

Before the cut flower industry existed, the flowering branches available in early spring served as the primary floral decoration for Easter and the week preceding it. Pussy willow, with its soft silver catkins, is still used in British flower arrangements in early spring and has a long history as a Palm Sunday alternative in northern European countries. In Scandinavian tradition, birch branches are brought indoors in the weeks before Easter and decorated with feathers and Easter eggs. This practice of celebrating with branches rather than flowers is ancient, simple, and beautiful.