Floriography, sexuality, and the horticulture of hair in Jorge Isaacs’ María

Tapping into the Romantic predilection for nature, flower symbolism is widespread in Jorge Isaacs’ María [1867], set amid the lush Cauca Valley in a period before the abolition of slavery in Colombia. Flowers have been identified as encoding female eroticism in the novel, propelling the tragic love affair between the narrator and the eponymous heroine, who, as well as frequently being compared to vegetation, spends much of her time in her garden, collecting and arranging flowers as love-tokens for Efraín. At the end of María, after the heroine’s death, the flowers picked in the throes of young love are described as ‘marchitas y carcomidas’, encoding María’s untimely demise as well as intimating, as I will suggest in the conclusion, the waning of plantation culture in South America. This article will explore horticulture motifs in the novel, including the multiple references to human hair, which was once thought to share the same physiology as plants.