Innocent Flower Girl

Please help the poor girl out!

"A light snow was falling, and the little girl with the tattered shawl had not sold a violet all day."

— Part 2 of Snoopy's novel, Peanuts

A sweet, shy, reserved, perhaps ill, girl whose profession is making artificial flowers or growing real ones. Probably an orphan, or at least poor, and liable to die a tear-jerking death.

Not to be confused with literal anthropomorphic flower girls. Flower Motifs are not enough to make an example of this trope; at the very least, there need to be corporeal flowers present.

Definitely not to be confused with the "flower girls" of Victorian England who were in fact sex workers. That said, many were actual flower sellers, but as a front rather than their main job.

See also Flowers of Femininity. Compare with Caring Gardener.

Do not confuse with Innocent Fanservice Girl. Nor with Innocent Plant Children.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Black Butler: Book of Circus: The Noah's Arc Circus performers find a girl like this, which made for a very spectacular sequence in the anime. As for the dying part? Well, it is Black Butler, so...
• Case Closed: In a filler episode, we meet a young woman named Midori Nozaki, the sister of a famous ikebana arrangement expert. After her rival Rika Ookano and her sponsor Shiraki steal her secret to make flowers bloom eternally and get her blacklisted from the ikebana circles, the eldest Nozaki kills herself with poison, and Midori starts carrying her revenge by working with the culprits and gaining their trust so she can kill them when they lower their guard. She manages to kill Shiraki by drugging and then strangling him, but Conan stops her when she's about to exact the revenge on Rika and kill herself on stage at the same time, using the same techniques that the deceased Nozaki-san used in her suicide.
• Descendants of Darkness: Eileen. Horrifyingly enough, she was kidnapped and murdered by Muraki so her heart would be given to Tsubaki Kakyouin, Eileen's closest friend, years before the story even started. When Tsubaki found out from Muraki himself, she felt so horribly guilty that with some more push from him, she developed a Split Personality named after Eileen, which started killing people in revenge.
• Digimon Adventure: Sora Takenouchi also subverts this, though she does eventually get into her mom's business by the time 02 rolls around. Coincidentally, she and Ino are both voiced by Colleen O'Shaughnessey.
• In El Cazador de la Bruja, L.A. buys all flowers off a young hispanic girl, selling them.
• Emma: A Victorian Romance is littered with these. There are literally 3 distinct flower girls in episode 11
• Fatal Fury: Horribly subverted in the first OVA. A cute and shy girl named Lily has a basket of flowers, and she approaches a man named Jeff Bogard to ask him if he can buy some of her stuff - so far, so good. But the kinda cute scene turns into tragedy when Jeff is attacked by several men in black, knifed as he tries to shield Lily... and then murdered by the mooks' leader Geese Howard. It turns out that Geese forced Lily to act as a Decoy Damsel so he could have a chance to kill Jeff. Flash forward to 10 years later, and when Jeff's son Terry comes back home to face his past and have Revenge, he meets the adult Lily as a beautiful Femme Fatale who has never forgotten her terrible stunt as a flower girl...
• HeartCatch Pretty Cure!: Tsubomi Hanasaki a.k.a Cure Blossom loves flowers, lives in a flower shop with her family, and aspires to be a botanist. She is also so shy that flowers and plants were her only friends until she met her Pretty Cure partner Erika. Her knowledge about flowers is so deep that she's able to point out the meaning of every flower residing in the hearts of former victims of the Desertrians.
• Honoo no Alpen Rose: Martha, though she's more outspoken than the standard. She's the one who offers Lundi some alpine roses and sings the Alpine Rose song, which tips Jeudi and Lundi off in Jeudi's Mysterious Past.
• The King of Fighters '94: In Tatsuya Shinjyouji's manga, the aforementioned Terry Bogard has quite a bit of Ship Tease with an Italian flower girl named Marucco, who also has ties to an Orphanage of Love. Unlike Lily and Sulia from the Fatal Fury animes, Marucco doesn't kick it — though in the second volume she and her friends are targetted by some Mafiosi, but Terry helps them.
• Kubera: Shakuntala fits this trope to a T: Gentle personality, dissuades conflicts, has a weak constitution, almost always seen sitting in a field full of flowers, gifts hand-made flower wreaths.
• La Seine No Hoshi: Simone worked at flower shop owned by her parents before they were brutally murdered by the bourgeoisie.
• Macross 7 has a shy, apparently mute girl who continually attempts, without success, to give Basara a bouquet of flowers. One starts to wonder if he's ignoring her on purpose. She eventually succeeds in the final episode. She tosses her flowers in shock and Basara manages to catch them, on the fly no less.
• Mobile Suit Gundam: Michelle Ratockie sells pastries, not flowers, but otherwise she fits in perfectly.
• Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show by Suehiro Maruo: Midori, who makes paper flowers and sells them on the street. Might not be exactly innocent as it is strongly implied she gives special "favors" to a male customer. Anyway, she leads a deplorably sad life, while the story goes on to Break the Cutie and Yank the Dog's Chain in a most sadistic manner.
• Naruto subverts this, since Ino Yamanaka works in her family's flower shop and has great knowledge of flower language... but she's a strong-willed, somewhat vain Tsundere.
• PandoraHearts: Oz meets one of these. Her horrible death was the demonstration of what happens when an illegal contractor's seal is completed.
• Princess Tutu: Freya is a beautiful, kind girl that can hear the "voices of the flowers". When Mytho briefly casts a spell on her to convince her that she is better than everyone and should give her heart to him, dark, raven-shaped flowers cover her flower bed and cut off the voices of her beloved plants. Tutu is able to break the spell when she points out to Freya how the voices are missing.
• Saint Seiya: Soul of Gold: A flower girl named Elena works hard in her shop to raise her siblings and manages to strike a sort-of bond with a once very, very evil man: Cancer Deathmask. Sadly, it's not enough to avert her death, which Deathmask doesn't take kindly.
• Tantei Opera Milky Holmes: Parodied by Cordelia Glauca. She's extremely beautiful (compared to the other members of the titular detective group), would like to believe that she's the embodiment of purity, and has flower motif— her hair is adored by flowers from nowhere. Oh, and she's also very insane (Played for Laughs), even by the series' standard; that's saying something.
• Texhnolyze: Ran plays the trope straight in some ways, but also subverts it in others: while she's very quiet and reserved, and goes through a lot of crap, she's not really all that innocent and is more morally ambiguous than many examples.
• The Twelve Kingdoms: A traveling show includes a small girl who makes little rabbit heads on sticks and sells them. She's the first character in that world to break through the protagonist's growing cloud of despair.

Comic Books

• Klara Prast of Runaways is a twelve-year-old girl who was married off to a much older, abusive man because her parents were horrified by her power to control plants.
• In Yoko Tsuno, Mieke is a shy bouquet-maker and seller from 16th century Bruegel.
• A silent little girl appears in Crimson selling flowers to the main protagonist. Turns out she is God masquerading in a human form.

Fairy Tales

• The original "The Little Mermaid", the tragic one, grew underwater flowers and plants in her spare time. The Disney movie has a scene with Ariel sitting on a rock, playing Loves Me Not with an underwater plant, possibly as a Mythology Gag.

Films — Animation

• Toyed with in Hayao Miyazaki's adaptation of Howl's Moving Castle. Sophie ends up owning a flower shop, and while she becomes stronger in the process she also remains kind and gentle, not going through levels of jerk-ass.

Films — Live-Action

• The film Alegria, inspired by the Cirque du Soleil production of the same name, has a whole troupe of unwanted, unloved kids under the thumb of an abusive taskmaster who forces them to sell flowers on the streets, as well as tend to them in the warehouse they're imprisoned in. They are inspired to revolt at the end. Sadly, there's Truth in Television here: the director got the idea for this when he was approached by such a kid.
• Thel Russel from Dead Man, a sweet and abused young woman who makes paper flowers and gets murdered at the beginning of the film.
• The flower girl in Dracula is a Red Shirt who becomes Count Dracula's first victim when arriving in London.
• In City Lights by Charlie Chaplin, The Tramp falls in love with a blind girl who is eking out a meager existence selling flowers on the street.
• A Little Princess (1995): After buying a bun with money she got as a handout, Sara sees an impoverished girl trying to sell yellow roses to passersby next to her mother and little sister. Sara gives the bun to the girl's little sister, who was eyeing it, and the girl gives her a rose for free as thanks.
• The Flower Girl, a Tear Jerker film from (yes!) North Korea. The sweet, angelic flower-selling heroine spends a lot of time crying since her father is dead, her mother is dying, her sister is blind, her brother is in jail, and they're dirt poor to boot.

Literature

• Kagerou Daze: Mary Kozakura. It's Played for Laughs when it's mentioned that she makes artificial flowers... but the income they generate is so small that it's barely noticeable. She also happened to die a very sad death on August 15th about a century ago but is still alive because (a) the creator of the eternal Heat Haze world is her grandmother Azami (and had the powers necessary to resurrect her) and (b) she's 1/4 medusa, meaning her aging process is immensely slow (she appears about 14, despite being ten times that age).
• Subverted in The Milkweed Triptych. Gretel likes to gather wildflowers, but it's only a sociopathic façade. In the final novel, she's exiled on a windswept island where no flowers can grow.
• Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, by Charles Dickens. Oh, so very much! Little Nell's a Purity Sue who was far Too Good for This Sinful Earth. The Old Curiosity Shop has some of Dicken's best Purple Prose.

Live-Action TV

• Possibly Kendall, a florist that Black Ranger Danny pines after in Power Rangers Wild Force. Of course, since Danny is her coworker in the flower shop and a Gentle Giant, he really fits as an Innocent Flower Boy.
• Star Trek: Voyager:
  • Kes is portrayed as kind-hearted, gentle, eager to experience the wonders of the universe, and with an expected lifespan of only nine years. She builds a hydroponics garden in Voyager's cargo bay in which she grows flowers. In episodes like "Cold Fire", "Warlord" and "Fury" where Kes shows her Dark Side, she'll be shown tending to those flowers to set a deliberate contrast.
  • An Invoked Trope in "Nemesis". Chakotay is shot down on a planet where handsome guerillas are fighting monstrous aliens who commit atrocities For the Evulz. He's taken to a village where a young girl greets Chakotay by placing a garland of flowers around his neck, and later decides to fight alongside the guerillas after seeing her and the other villagers dragged off to be executed. Turns out the whole scenario is designed to brainwash Chakotay and other conscripts into hating the enemy. Chakotay is taken back to the village at the end of the episode only to find it as good as new and is shocked when the exact same girl greets him in the exact same manner.

Music

• "Artificial Flowers," Breakaway Pop Hit from the musical Tenderloin, was about one of these.
• Featured in "The Rain, The Park, and Other Things" by the Cowsills, overlapping with Manic Pixie Dream Girl
• The Beatles' "Penny Lane": "Behind the shelter in the middle of a roundabout, a pretty nurse is selling poppies from a tray." (Selling flowers is an odd side job for a nurse, implying she's probably selling Remembrance Day poppies to raise money for a charity.)

Myths & Religion

• Older Than Feudalism: Greek Mythology features the young goddess of spring, rejuvenation, and youth named Kore (Maiden). One day she was collecting flowers, and then she was kidnapped by Hades and forcibly taken to the underworld. After eating six pomegranate seeds, she spends half of the year as Persephone, Hades's consort and queen of the dead, which is when winter occurs.
• Japanese Mythology has Konohanasakuya-hime, the blossom-princess and goddess of Mount Fuji. She fell in love with Ninigi no Mikoto, the grandson of Amaterasu, who liked her as well and persisted in marrying Konohana when her dad, Oho-Yama, wanted Ninigo to marry her older sister Iwa-naga. However, Ninigi soon suspected her of infidelity since Konohana became pregnant in just one night; enraged at Ninigi's accusation, Konohana trapped herself in a doorless hut and set it on fire, vowing that the child would not be hurt if it were truly the offspring of the Ninigi. Not only she gave birth to triplets (Hoderi, Hosuseri, and Hoor), but neither of them was hurt so her innocence was proved and she was absolved.

Tabletop Games

• Shelyn, Pathfinder's goddess of love and beauty, is strongly associated with flowers, particularly chrysanthemums. Her priests (and the goddess herself, in many depictions) often wear flowers in their hair, and many temples of Shelyn cultivate beautiful flower gardens. She governs the romantic aspects of love (carnal lust is the domain of a different goddess entirely) and is a Friend to All Living Things, even hoping to one day redeem her corrupted brother, whose current incarnation is basically an expy of Pinhead from Hellraiser.

Theatre

• In Jean Anouilh's play Colombe, the titular character is exactly this when she meets her future husband while delivering flowers to his diva of a mother. The audience learns this however in a flashback after having witnessed Colombe become an opportunistic and adulterous actress during the course of the play.
• Ophelia from Hamlet becomes this archetype in her madness, as she carries flowers everywhere, hands them out to the people around her, and eventually falls out of a tree while hanging garlands from its branches and drowns in the brook below. It's not played entirely straught, though: depending on one's interpretation of the scene, the flowers Ophelia hands out may only exist in her mind, and they're not so innocent, considering each of her flowers represents a thinly veiled criticism of the people she hands them to.
• In La Bohème, Mimí sews artificial flowers, and although she's not entirely innocent (she lives with her lover Rodolfo out of wedlock, and then has a brief affair with a viscount for his money before going back to Rodolfo), her sweetness, gentleness and Incurable Cough of Death definitely evoke this trope.
• Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors. Choked by the weedy Crapsack World she lives in (and undoubtedly by her sadistic boyfriend), all she wants is to be with her coworker, Seymour, "Somewhere That's Green"...
• Though unnamed, the Rose Seller in "Who Will Buy?" has one of the loveliest solos in Oliver!. The part is often cast and costumed to evoke this character archetype.
  Who will buy my sweet red roses/Two blooms for a penny?

Toys

• A character literally named Lil' Flower Girl in the Precious Miseries doll and art series is a rather Goth example of this trope, wearing a black and pink dress decorated in spiderwebs and skulls. Her description on the tag of the doll reads as follows:
  "Dressed in her best outfit, she goes forth into the streets to sell her dead flowers. Because she is not very talkative, when SHE finally decides who is to buy from her, she will follow them all day with her arm extended and flower in hand."
• In the Tamagotchi series, Flowertchi (known outside of Japan as Violetchi) is a soft-hearted girl who loves flowers and has a very wide knowledge of them. She loves to garden at Tamagotchi School and at her own home and has two little flowers on the top of her head to make the point clear.

Video Games

• Catherine-Marie Cygne from Aviary Attorney is a sweet, soft-spoken flower seller who might be hiding something. Also a swan.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Subverted by Dibella, the Aedric Divine Goddess of Beauty, in the series' mythology. Dibella is associated with elements of innocence, including always being depicted holding a delicate white flower. However, she is also associated with the carnal aspects of sex, and worshiping her takes the primary form of sexual acts. Additionally, her followers are known to mock the disfigured and use their sexual charms for means of manipulation.
  • In Skyrim, Sofie from the Hearthfire DLC is in Windhelm selling flowers since her mother died and her Stormcloak father disappeared in the war. The player can help her out by buying her flowers, or adopt her if they have a house.
• Pictured above: Polka from Eternal Sonata, a Delicate and Sickly girl who sells Floral Powder and, after befriending Chopin, joins the cast as their Squishy Wizard.
• Aerith from Final Fantasy VII is first introduced with a basket of flowers and appears to follow the trope, but it's subverted as she turns out to be neither shy nor reserved: she is in fact flirty, witty and spirited, and rather hands on for a White Magician Girl too. She does fulfill the "tear-jerker death" part at the hands of Sephiroth, though.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Fire Emblem: Awakening:
    • Sumia. Instead of selling flowers, she uses them for fortune-telling, and in some of her endings, she becomes well-known as a bringer of good luck.
    • Her daughter Cynthia is also a big fan of flower fortunes, and in her supports with any of her possible fathers (either Chrom, a male Avatar, Frederick, Gaius or Henry) she wants to use flower petals to craft him an awesome battle entry.
  • In Fire Emblem Fates, the Birthright path has the Avatar and their group meeting one in Nohr. She is actually Elise, the youngest Nohrian princess, who has run away from home after the Avatar's defection to Hoshido and is living with her nanny instead. And later in the path, she does get a dramatic and sad death scene.
• Inverted by Rina from Gaia Online, who is an energetic Genki Girl, a bully, a Lethal Chef, and a pervert who asked Nicolae for an Alruna's Rose so she could have a "sexy succubus" companion. And in the Demonbusters event, she sided with Sentinel's Infernal Nation.
• Harvest Moon:
  • Played with Nina from Harvest Moon and her granddaughter Popuri from Harvest Moon 64. They adore plants and work at flower shops but are loud and spunky. Popuri's mother Lillia fit closer to the archetype in Harvest Moon: Back to Nature. She's Popuri's Delicate and Sickly mother whose husband left on a journey to heal her.
  • Lyla from Harvest Moon Save The Homeland and Harvest Moon: Magical Melody is an Expy of Popuri but is far more subdued in personality. She owns a flower shop.
• Kairi as a child in Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, she is shown to have some affection for flowers, as she appears with flowers in her hand and is picking more during the final credits. But she won't hesitate to give them away in gratitude, like giving them to Aqua as thanks for saving her from the Unversed. Also, her Keyblade, Destiny's Embrace, has a floral design.
• One of these is in Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals. She suffers exhaustion because she's obsessed with gathering the Flower from the Mountaintop, and the party have to go get it for her so she can finally rest. She also delivers a Green Aesop to the owner of a polluting factory in the same town.
• Gender-flipped with Basil from OMORI. He is quite shy and soft-spoken, is fairly knowledgeable about flower language, occasionally wears flowers in his hair, and potentially ends up tragically gutting himself with a pair of garden shears.
• Pokémon Red and Blue has Erika, who is a gym leader. She doesn't seem to be Delicate and Sickly, but is a reserved ojou-type woman.
• Kira from Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney poses as one of these but is actually a witch.
• Nozomi Harasaki of Shenmue is a sweet, kind, and tender girl who is very fond of the protagonist Ryo, and her day job is helping out at her mother's flower shop.
• Ameena Leffeld from Star Ocean: Till the End of Time fits this trope perfectly. For special bonus points, she also looks a great deal like Aerith.
• Entirely subverted by Yuuka Kazami of Touhou Project. She's a flower youkai, a power that's just as useless as it sounds... but is one of the oldest youkai in Gensokyo, and thus extremely powerful (Marisa copied the Master Spark from her), and generally uninclined to be merciful to humans. Fandom takes this even further, calling her the Ultimate Sadistic Creature and having her wreak unholy vengeance on anyone trespassing on her sunflower garden.
• Camellia in Vampyr (2018) is a florist at Whitechapel and a lovely young woman who happens to be mute, with even Darius Patrescu considering her an angel. She can potentially die a tragic death if the main protagonist feeds on her, and her dying thoughts are heart-breaking to hear.
• Florina from Wild ARMs 3. She can "feel" the pain of the planet, grows flowers, and, after a sidequest, will grow the usually hard-to-find healing berries for you. In a break from the convention, she doesn't die at the end of the story.
• Luty from Xenosaga is a little girl who became mute from the trauma of her home planet Ariadne disappearing some time before the story begins. A sidequest involves finding and growing a flower from Ariadne, which cheers her up enough to gradually get her to speak again. When encountered again in Episode II, she begins to work as a nurse and is involved in another sidequest, where she wants to grow a garden of Ariadne Flowers to help make everybody in Second Miltia happy.

Western Animation

• Futurama: Dr. Zoidberg's girlfriend, Marianne, from the show's penultimate episode "Stench and Stenchability".
• The Looney Tunes Deduce You Say has Daffy Duck playing Doorlock Holmes, who after one humiliating setback after another, and his 'bumbling' assistant (Porky) capturing the big dangerous goon criminal, lays into a sweet old granny-type for selling flowers without a license. Needless to say, she's the big dangerous goon's mother...
• The Simpsons: Renee in the episode "Dumbbell Indemnity" makes her entrance by offering a depressed Moe a flower from her cart. She's a bit older and snarkier than most examples of this trope, but still very sweet and kind.

Real Life

• There is the so-called flower-girl scam, where seemingly cute and innocent little girls who are controlled by unscrupulous gangs will grab the clothes of passer-byes and won't let go until their victims buy overpriced (fake or real) flowers and sometimes they'll even try to pickpocket them. They typically appear in touristy areas of China and mostly target couples or single women. Here's a video on this issue.

---