prokopetz:

Context: any reliable source will tell you that the language of flowers was only ever practiced by a handful of very narrow subcultures, and to anyone outside them, the selection and arrangement of a bouquet would have been essentially meaningless apart from its aesthetic value.

What many sources fail to emphasise is that even within those specialised subcultures, there was typically very little consensus regarding the meanings of particular blooms; a given bouquet could yield totally different readings according to different floriographic traditions, even if those traditions were contemporary with each other.

That in mind…

Concept: a group of young nobles resolve to aid in their friend’s romantic pursuits, and secretly have a bouquet proposing a formal courtship sent to a young lady of their acquaintance – in their friend’s name.

The recipient, however, adheres to a different floriographic tradition, in which the bouquet in question translates not as a request to initiate courtship, but as a solicitation for the services of a discrete assassin. By some horrifying coincidence, the young lady’s family indeed has a sideline in assassination business, and though she herself has never taken on a contract before, she resolves that there’s no time like the present and sets about arranging her unwitting would-be paramour’s demise.

(One can either play it straight from there, or go with an escalating comedy of errors as bouquets admitting increasingly unlikely misinterpretations fly back and forth. Either works!)