Innocent Flower Girl

Yes, 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. Liable to die a tear-jerking death.

Not to be confused with literal flower girls such as Sunny Funny in Parappa the Rapper, or Cheza in Wolf's Rain (she's a hybrid of human and flower DNA). Flower Motifs are not enough to make an example of this trope; at the very least, there need to be corporeal flowers present.

Do not confuse with Innocent Fanservice Girl.

Examples of Innocent Flower Girl include:

Anime and Manga

• 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.
• Freya from Princess Tutu 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.
• Naruto subverts this, since Ino Yamanaka works in her family's flower shop and has great knowledge of flower language... but she's a strongwilled, somewhat vain Tsundere.
  • Sora Takenouchi also subverts this, though she does eventually get into her mom's business by the time 02 rolls around. Coincidentially, she and Ino are both voiced by Colleen O'Shaughnessey.
• Tsubomi Hanasaki a.k.a Cure Blossom, from Heartcatch Pretty Cure, 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.
• Michelle Ratockie from Mobile Suit Gundam sells pastries, but otherwise she fits in perfectly.
• One of the murderers in Detective Conan is a Yamato Nadeshiko young woman named Midori Nozaki, whose beloved older sister was a famous ikebana arrangement expert. After her rival Rika Ookano and her sponsor Shiraki steal her secret to make flowers bloom eternally and blacklist her, the eldest Nozaki kills herself with poison, and Midori starts carrying her revenge by working with them 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.
• Oz meets one in Pandora Hearts. Her horrible death was the demonstration of what happens when an illegal contractor's seal is completed.
• Midori in Suehiro Maruo's manga Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show, who makes paper flowers and sell 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.
• Horribly subverted in the first Fatal Fury OVA. We see a cute girl with a basket of flowers approach Jeff Bogard and ask him to 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 the girl... and then murdered by the mooks's leader Geese Howard. It turns out that he forced the girl, Lily, to act as a Decoy Damsel so he could have a chance to kill Jeff. Flash forward to 10 years later, and we meet the adult Lily as a beautiful Femme Fatale; however, she has never forgotten her terrible stunt as a flower girl...
• Parodied by Cordelia Glauca in Tantei Opera Milky Holmes. 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.
• Ran from Texhnolyze 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.
• Eileen from Yami no Matsuei. 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.
• Martha from Honoo no Alpen Rose, though she's more outspoken than the standard. She's the one who offers Lundi some alpine roses, triggering him and Jeudi's re-discovery of the Alpine Rose song.
• A traveling show in The Twelve Kingdoms includes a small girl who makes little rabbit heads on sticks and sells them. She's the first characters in that world to break through the protagonist's growing cloud of despair.
• Played completely straight in Black Butler: Book of Circus.

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.

Fairy Tales

• The original Little Mermaid, the tragic one, grew underwater flowers and plants in her spare time. One VHS cover of the movie has Ariel sitting on a rock preoccupied with underwater plants, possibly as a Mythology Gag.
• Another Hans Christian Anderson character, the Little Matchstick Girl, fits the trope as well, except for what she sells.

Live-Action TV

• Kes in Star Trek: Voyager built her own hydroponics garden in Voyager's cargo hold, though it got burned up when she suffered one of her rare Creepy Child moments. Most of the time however Kes is portrayed as kind, innocent and understanding. She also suffered a tragic fate, being booted off the cast for a busty blonde in skintight catsuit, only to return a few seasons later as an Axe Crazy granny in a revenge plot with an ill-conceived motive and an unconvincing resolution.
• 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.

Film

• In the Dracula film from 1931, the titular character preys on an innocent flower girl in London.
• Let's not forget the blind flower seller in Charlie Chaplin's City Lights. At the end of the movie, thanks to the Little Tramp, she's had an operation to restore her sight.
• 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.
• Subverted for laughs in Terry Gilliam's Yellowbeard.
• Averted in Hayao Miyazaki's adaptation of Howl's Moving Castle where, while Sophie ends up owning a flower shop, she becomes stronger in the process.

Music

• "Artificial Flowers," Breakaway Pop Hit from the musical Tenderloin, was about one of these.

Oral Tradition

• Older Than Feudalism: Greek Mythology features the young goddess of spring, rejuvenation and youth named Kore (Maiden). She was abducted by Hades while collecting flowers. She now has to spend half of the year as Persephone, Queen of Underworld. Depending on interpretation, that could even fit the tear-jerking death part of this trope.
• Japanese Mythology has Konohanasakuya-hime, the blossom-princess and goddess of Mount Fuji. She fell in love with Ninigi no Mikoto, who suspect her of infidelity since Konohana became pregnant in just one night. Enraged at Ninigi's accusation, Konohana trap herself in doorless hut and set it on fire. She vowed that the child would not be hurt if it were truly the offspring of the Ninigi.

Theater

• Mimì from the Puccini opera La Boheme. (Absolutely not Mimi from Rent.)
• Ophelia, Hamlet. 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.
• Averted by Pygmalion. Eliza Doolittle may be a flower girl, but she's far from innocent.
• 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 Adorkable coworker, Seymour, "Somewhere That's Green"...

Video Games

• Pictured above: Polka from Eternal Sonata.
• Aeris/Aerith from Final Fantasy VII. Subverted when she turns out to be neither shy nor reserved. She did die a tear-jerking death.
  • Aerith gets a cameo in Final Fantasy Tactics. In a sidequest, she is nearly sold into prostitution by the local thugs before Cloud, newly arrived in Ivalice, saves the day.
• 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.
• 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.
• Would you like a flower? Make a girl or a penguin talk!
  • She's not exactly innocent - she just acts that way. Refusing to by a flower nets Ark a nice little insult (though admittedly, he does refuse really tactlessly).
• 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.
  • And Mariel from Wild ARMs; Florina is pretty much an Expy of her. In the remake, Mariel can join your party, but she can't really attack enemies, only use healing abilities based on the ubiquitous berries.
• 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.
• Pokémon Red and Blue has Erika, the flower shop clerks behind the Petalburg forest, and, to an extent, the entire town of Floaroma.
• Nina, Popuri, and Lyla from Harvest Moon.
• One of these in Lufia 2. 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.

Web Original

• Hanami in Tasakeru is a Deconstruction of this trope.

Other

• A character literally named Lil' Flower Girl in the Precious Miseries doll and art series is dark 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."

• Mocked pretty thoroughly in Edward Gorey's The Hapless Child.^[context?]