Of all the meanings in the language of flowers, the white lily's is one of the steadiest. Kate Greenaway's illustrated Language of Flowers (1884) gives it as "Purity. Sweetness." That reading was old long before the Victorians wrote it down. In medieval paintings of the Annunciation, the angel Gabriel often holds out a white lily to the Virgin Mary, and Lilium candidum is still called the Madonna lily. English itself carries the idea: since the sixteenth century, "lily" has been used as an adjective meaning white, pure or lovely, as in "lily-white".

Steady is not the same as fixed, though. Henrietta Dumont's American Language of Flowers (1851) gives the plain lily as "Majesty". Greenaway keeps "Majesty" but moves it to the imperial lily, and gives the yellow lily something sharper: "Falsehood. Gaiety." Dumont even disagrees with herself about the lily of the valley, calling it "Modesty" in one chapter and "Return of happiness" in her word list.

None of this is a mistake to be corrected. The historian Beverly Seaton, in The Language of Flowers: A History, shows that the flower books were written by different people for different readers and never formed one agreed code. The white lily simply happens to be a flower where most of them, and the painters before them, landed in the same place.