Birth Flowers

Birth Flowers by Month: The Full Chart, and Where It Runs Short

All twelve birth flowers in one chart, checked against The Old Farmer's Almanac and Farmers' Almanac, plus two months where the Almanac's list runs short.

Last updated 2026-08-22

In brief

The Old Farmer's Almanac's current chart names one or two flowers for every month except two, where its own page is the narrow one: March, where it names the daffodil alone and explains that "jonquil" is just another name for the same flower, while Farmers' Almanac's chart adds jonquil as a second flower and Farmers' Almanac's dedicated March page adds a third, cherry blossom; and November, where the Almanac names chrysanthemum alone while Farmers' Almanac's chart pairs it with peony. A third source, Wikipedia's own September article, cites a 2013 gem-resource site for a flower neither almanac carries at all: forget-me-not.

Grid chart of all twelve months' birth flowers, flagging March and November where The Old Farmer's Almanac's own current chart names fewer flowers than Farmers' Almanac's, and September where Wikipedia's article adds a third

The current chart, checked directly, not assembled from a dozen retail blogs

This calendar has now published a separate page for all twelve months' birth flowers, one at a time, over the course of several weeks. Laid out together instead, checked against The Old Farmer's Almanac's current chart the week this page went up, the full run reads: January is carnation and snowdrop. February is violet and primrose. March is daffodil, styled on the Almanac's page as "Daffodil & Jonquil" even though the text calls jonquil just another name for the same flower rather than a second bloom. April is daisy and sweet pea. May is lily of the valley and hawthorn. June is rose and honeysuckle. July is larkspur and water lily. August is gladiolus and poppy. September is aster and morning glory. October is marigold and cosmos. November is chrysanthemum alone, with no second flower on the page. December is narcissus, most often the paperwhite, and holly.

Ten of the twelve months carry a clear pair under that current framing, and two carry a single flower: March, where the second name turns out to describe the same plant, and November, where nothing on the page names a second flower at all. This calendar's page on birthstones by month found a parallel shape in the gem trade's chart, where two different months turned out to be the ones a trade group's current list ran short on.

No 1912 meeting behind this one

Birthstones trace to a specific date: a 1912 Kansas City meeting where a US retail jewelers' trade group adopted a standard chart, later revised on the record three more times. Birth flowers have no equivalent founding meeting. Wikipedia's article on the broader tradition, floriography, traces the modern "language of flowers" fashion to Ottoman Constantinople's 18th-century tulip culture, reaching Britain through the poet and traveler Mary Wortley Montagu after her stay there in the 1710s. The first published dictionary attaching fixed meanings to individual flowers, per that same article, was Joseph Hammer-Purgstall's Dictionnaire du langage des fleurs in 1809; the first true floriography dictionary followed in 1819, written by Louise Cortambert under the pen name Madame Charlotte de la Tour. The English writer Robert Tyas added his own version in 1836.

None of those three books is a birth-flower chart specifically, and none of them is the document any current almanac cites as its chart's origin. The modern month-by-month birth-flower list appears to be a later distillation of that general Victorian flower-meaning fashion, assembled by almanacs and florists rather than adopted at any single meeting a source names. That absence of a founding date is itself the difference from birthstones worth stating plainly; papering over it with a vague "since Victorian times" is what many calendar pages do instead.

March and November break the pattern

Checking The Old Farmer's Almanac's current page against Farmers' Almanac's current page, flower by flower, turns up two months where the two disagree, and on both of them the Almanac carries fewer flowers than its counterpart.

March is the more tangled case. The Old Farmer's Almanac heads the month "Daffodil & Jonquil," but its body text says the March birth flower "is the daffodil, referred to as the jonquil (which is simply a type of daffodil)": one flower under two names, not two flowers. Farmers' Almanac's current chart lists March as "Daffodil and Jonquil" without that caveat, treating jonquil as a second, distinct bloom (it is in fact a specific species, Narcissus jonquilla, not a synonym for daffodil in general). Farmers' Almanac's dedicated March lore page goes a step further still, naming one other flower: cherry blossom, which its text says "is sometimes considered the March birth month flower," particularly in Japanese culture. Farmers' Almanac's chart page and its lore page don't agree with each other on whether March has two flowers or three.

November is the cleaner case. The Old Farmer's Almanac's current chart, on both its roundup page and its dedicated November page, names only the chrysanthemum; neither page mentions a second flower anywhere. Farmers' Almanac's current chart pairs the same chrysanthemum with a second flower, peony. A shopper checking one Almanac page for November's birth flower gets one answer; checking the other gets two.

A third flower, and neither almanac carries it

Wikipedia's September article states plainly that "the birth flowers are the forget-me-not, morning glory and aster," three flowers rather than the two either almanac's current chart names for the month. The claim traces, per Wikipedia's cited source, to a gem-and-jewelry resource site's birth-flower page, archived in 2013. Neither The Old Farmer's Almanac's current September page nor Farmers' Almanac's current September page mentions forget-me-not at all. It isn't possible to say from here whether that third flower reflects an older tradition the two almanacs have since dropped, or a single compiler's addition that Wikipedia picked up and neither almanac ever carried in the first place; what's checkable is that today, on three current pages, one names three flowers and two name two.

December turns up a smaller wrinkle, worth a line, not a whole finding. Both almanacs agree the month's flowers are narcissus, usually specified as the paperwhite, and holly. But The Old Farmer's Almanac's dedicated December page doesn't agree with its own roundup page on the order: the dedicated page's title reads "December Birth Flowers: Holly and Narcissus," holly first, while the roundup page's body text calls narcissus the "primary" flower and holly the "secondary" one. Both flowers are on both lists either way; it's only the ranking that wobbles, and only within one organization's site.

Why one flower can have two names and two histories

A recurring shape across this calendar's twelve individual birth-flower pages is a plant carrying two unconnected names, one botanical and one common, each with its own separate origin. Rose and honeysuckle, June's pair, split that way: honeysuckle's genus name Lonicera honors a 16th-century German botanist who had nothing to do with the plant, while the English word "honeysuckle" comes from an unrelated Old English phrase that originally described clover. Larkspur, one of July's two flowers, does it from the opposite direction: its scientific name Delphinium describes the shape of its nectary, not the lark's spur its English name refers to.

A second recurring shape is a flower whose species count keeps moving. March's daffodil has been counted anywhere from 6 species by Linnaeus in 1753 to 87 by one modern registry, depending on how narrowly "species" is drawn. November's chrysanthemum carries a split identity of its own: Japan's Imperial Seal and highest civilian honor on one side, a graveside flower tied to All Saints' Day across much of Catholic Europe on the other, the same bloom read as opposite things by two different cultures rather than by two different trade groups. No single body has ever had the standing to settle any of this the way a court can settle a legal question. Each source, checked on its own current page, is accurately reporting what it currently says. The chart above is what those pages currently say; the two months flagged are where they currently don't agree, and this page will note it if a future revision closes either gap.

Frequently asked questions

Which flower corresponds to each birth month?

Per the current chart from the Almanac (as of this page's check): January carnation, snowdrop; February violet, primrose; March daffodil; April daisy, sweet pea; May lily of the valley, hawthorn; June rose, honeysuckle; July larkspur, water lily; August gladiolus, poppy; September aster, morning glory; October marigold, cosmos; November chrysanthemum; December narcissus, holly.

Is jonquil a second birth flower for March, or another name for daffodil?

It depends which page is checked: the Almanac's text treats it as a single plant that goes by two names, not a separate bloom. Farmers' Almanac, on its current chart, lists jonquil alongside daffodil as two separate flowers; jonquil is actually its own separate species rather than a synonym daffodil goes by, so the two words point at two different plants, not one.

Does November have one birth flower or two?

Just one, according to the Almanac: only chrysanthemum appears, the same way on both its general chart and the page devoted specifically to November. Farmers' Almanac, on the other hand, adds peony alongside chrysanthemum as a second bloom on its current chart.

Is cherry blossom a birth flower for March?

Only in a separate March lore write-up published by Farmers' Almanac, and even that page hedges, describing cherry blossom as an occasional pick for March, especially within Japanese custom. Its summary chart skips cherry blossom entirely, and the Almanac doesn't mention it anywhere on its pages either.

Is forget-me-not a birth flower for September?

Wikipedia does list it, in its piece covering September, as a third birth flower alongside the chart's usual aster and morning-glory pairing, citing an archived 2013 gem-resource page. Neither almanac's page for September, as it reads today, mentions it.

Why don't birth-flower charts trace to one official source the way birthstones do?

Birthstones have a documented origin point, a 1912 US trade convention. Birth flowers never had a comparable founding event; they descend from the broader Victorian flower-symbolism trend, whose earliest known flower-meaning dictionaries date to 1809 and 1819, and today's month-by-month chart looks like something the flower-and-catalog trade pieced together on its own over time, not a single formally adopted standard.

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Written and edited by the DayAlmanac Editorial Team