Native to Mexico, tuberose, Agave amica (formerly known as Polianthes tuberosa), has, according to Maggie Campbell-Culver in her The Origin of Plants (2001), been cultivated in England, since 1629.  Others state that it was introduced in Tudor times.

In Britain it needs protection from frosts and is usually grown in conservatories, though it can be transferred outside in the warmer months.  Although not much grown at present, apparently it was much grown in the early years of the twentieth century when it was appreciated for its creamy-white flowers which produce a fragrance variously described as ‘remarkably captivating’, ‘strong and enticing’ or ‘overpowering’.

According to some versions of the Language of Flowers tuberose represented ‘purity, peace and innocence’, but, as in the case of many other plants, it also had other, very different, associations, such as ‘dangerous pleasures’, as depicted on the card here.

In her memoir of the 1920s, We Danced All Night (1971), the prolific novelist Barbara Cartland (1901-2000) recorded that tuberose was considered to be an aphrodisiac:  ‘He [Lord Wimborne was incurably romantic, to him love must always be “une grande passion”, otherwise it was not interesting.  He always sent bunches of tuberoses (believed by the Edwardians to incite desire) to any woman he fancied’.

Similarly according to Lyndsy Spence, in her The Mistress of Mayfair – Men, Money and the Marriage of Doris Delevingne (2018),  in the early 1930s when the promiscuous Doris, then estranged from her husband Lord Castlerosse,  wanted to seduce the fashionable, but homosexual, photographer Cecil Beaton, ‘she scattered tuberoses – the most ”carnal of scents” – on his bed’.  This proved successful and Doris and Cecil engaged in a brief affair.

D.C. Watts in Elsevier’s Dictionary of Plant Lore (2007), apparently taking  information from Harry Middleton Hyatt’s Folk-lore from Adams County Illinois (1935), states that tuberose is ‘an unlucky flower in American belief, possibly because of the waxy appearance, like death.  Others think they emit the odour of death, still others that if you close yourself in a room with tuberoses, the scent will kill you’.

Images:  main, ‘Trichromatic P.C. by J. Welch & Sons, Portsmouth’, posted in Glasgow, 26 July 1905, addressed to Miss E. Barr, at an address in Stockton-on-Tees, with the message:  ‘Is this what is going on at Stockton.  All well at 211.  Will give you all the news when I come back’ [signature illegible]; inset, on sale from a flower stall in Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, London, July 2024.

24 June 2024; last updated 3 October 2025.