[f. FLOWER sb. and v. + -AGE 1. Cf. OF. fleurage.]
† 1. (See quot.) Obs.
1688. R. Holme, Armoury, II. 115/2. Flowerage, is the setting of sorts of Flower together, in husks, and so to hang them up with strings.
[Hence 1706 in Phillips (ed. Kersey); and in later Dicts.].
2. a. Flowers collectively, blossom; a display or assemblage of flowers; floral ornament or decoration. lit. and fig. b. The process of flowering; the result of this process. lit. and fig.
1831. J. Wilson, Unimore, vi. 7.
| Never in such deep herbage dipped their hoofs | |
| The red-deer, nor the goats along the cliffs | |
| On such profusion of wild-flowerage browsed. |
1840. Carlyle, Heroes, iii. (1858), 261. This glorious Elizabethan Era with its Shakspeare, as the outcome and flowerage of all which had preceded it, is itself attributable to the Catholicism of the Middle Ages.
1864. Tennyson, Aylmer’s F., 203.
| Busying themselves about the flowerage | |
| That stood from out a stiff brocade. |
1880. Swinburne, Stud. in Song, 78. As he crosses the zone of their flowerage [sea-weed] that knows not of sunshine and snow.
1887. W. Pater, Imag. Portraits, iv. 144. A wonderful flowerage of architectural fancy, with broken attic roofs, passed over and beyond the earlier fabric.
