Lantana: The Fierce Bloom That Symbolizes Tough Love and Wild Energy

Lantana flowers offer dazzling blossoms, playful colors, and lush foliage and attract pollinators into the garden. In the language of flowers, lantana symbolizes rigor, which has several meanings of its own, including demanding, difficult, extremely accurate, thorough, or exhaustive. It can also mean stiffness, rigidity, severity, or strictness.

Lantana’s Language of Love

Floriography, more commonly known as the Victorian Language of Flowers, attributed just about every type of flower with a symbolic meaning, which could be conveyed by gifting someone a bouquet of carefully selected blossoms.

Lantana flowers speak volumes in the language of flowers. They symbolize rigor and passion – quite the fiery combination! Victorian-era folks would send these bright blooms to secret crushes as a cheeky way of saying, “My feelings for you burn hot.” Think of them as the original spicy text messages of the plant world.

Butterfly Magnet with a Mission

These flowers symbolize social connections and community. They attract so many butterflies that some gardeners call them “butterfly bars.” This connection to butterflies in flower symbolism links lantana to ideas about the soul and spiritual transformation.

Sacred Protection

Lantana is believed to ward off evil spirits and negative energy in parts of India and Africa. People plant it near doorways for protection. Think of it as nature’s version of those little security cameras—except prettier and they don’t need batteries.

The Sunshine Reminder

Yellow varieties of lantana symbolize brightness, joy, and the warm feeling of sunshine. Gardeners sometimes plant them to create “happy corners” in their yards.

Lantana Flowers in Greek Mythology

Lantana flowers are often compared to the hydra of Greek mythology, which only Hercules was able to slay during his second labor with the help of cauterizing fire and Athena’s sword.

The Lernaean Hydra was a snake-like monster that had nine heads, one of which was immortal, and it terrorized the people of Lerna. Whenever anyone tried to kill the hydra by cutting off a head, each lost head would be replaced by two more.

Common lantana is similar to the hydra in that it also sprouts multiple new shoots when one shoot is cut off. So, you cannot kill a common lantana plant by cutting it at the base of its stem; it will only produce multiple new shoots and grow back larger and stronger than before.

In some ways, common lantana is more terrible than the hydra. For example, it cannot be killed with fire. When Lantana camara burns in a forest fire or intentionally in an effort to eliminate or control its spread, it produces several new plant shoots from its basal root system under the ground, where fire can’t reach it.

It also protects itself from eradication by dropping multiple seeds that are spread in the clusters of berries that common lantana plants produce.

Religious Significance

In the African diasporic religion formed in Brazil known as Candomblé, common lantana with yellow-colored flowers represent Oxum, the goddess of rivers. At the same time, white lantana flowers represent Oxalá, the god of the sky who represents purity.

Rigor at Heart, Beauty in the Garden

With its resilient nature, common lantana makes an easy addition to just about any garden or container, and it’s perfect for supporting the pollinators in your neighborhood. Just be careful to plant it in a location where it won’t be able to spread and overtake the native vegetation.