xochitla (FCbk11f187r)
This iconographic example, featuring a black-line drawing of a flower garden (xochitla), is included in this digital collection for the purpose of making comparisons with related hieroglyphs. The term selected for this example comes from the text near the image in the Digital Florentine Codex. There is no gloss, per se. This example shows four trapezoidal flower beds filled with what appear to be the same type of flower, rather generic. The technology of horticulture is informative here, speaking of germination, suggesting that the flowers were grown from seed. The text refers to the beauty and freshness of the garden.
Stephanie Wood
The -tla suffix indicates a place of abundance of the subject here, although sometimes the -tla has lost its final -n (a common omission in alphabetic Nahuatl) and really refers to -tlan, meaning “by” or “among.” The use of “s” in place of “x” is a largely modern substitution, but early examples such as this are known. This substitution is possibly owing to the influence of Spaniards’ pronunciation difficulties with the “x” and their influence on the Nahua tlacuilos, perhaps combined with the substitution of “s” for “z,” which spilled over into replacing “x.” This is the first flower garden to enter this digital collection (as of November 2025), but the flowers do resemble any number of other flowers in this collection. A few examples of compound hieroglyphs that contain xochitl appear below.
Stephanie Wood
Stephanie Wood
1577
Jeff Haskett-Wood
flor, macizo, macizos, trapezoide, trapezoides
xochitla, the flower garden, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/xochitla
el jardín de flores
Stephanie Wood
Available at Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital, edited by Kim N. Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, "Book 11: Earthly Things", fol. 187r, Getty Research Institute, 2023. https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/en/book/11/folio/187r/images/0 Accessed 16 November 2025.
Images of the digitized Florentine Codex are made available under the following Creative Commons license: CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International). For print-publication quality photos, please contact the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana ([email protected]). The Library of Congress has also published this manuscript, using the images of the World Digital Library copy. “The Library of Congress is unaware of any copyright or other restrictions in the World Digital Library Collection. Absent any such restrictions, these materials are free to use and reuse.”
