Born in August

• LeoThe Lion
• VirgoThe Maiden

An August birthday begins as Leo. Between 1920 and 2026 the sun moved into Virgo on the 22nd of August in 17 years (the first in 1980), the 23rd in 83 and the 24th in 7 (the last in 1947), in universal time. A birthday on 22 August, 23 August or 24 August is therefore Leo or Virgo depending on the year, and in the year of a crossing on the hour; the page for each of those dates gives the sign and the moment of the crossing for every year.

Every other date in August had one sign all day in every one of those years: Leo up to the 21st and Virgo from the 25th.

In the astrological tradition Leo is a fire sign and a fixed one, ruled by the Sun. Printed tables give it as 23 July – 22 August; between 1920 and 2026 the sun entered it on the 22nd or 23rd of July and left it on the 22nd, 23rd or 24th of August.

In the astrological tradition Virgo is an earth sign and a mutable one, ruled by Mercury. Printed tables give it as 23 August – 22 September; between 1920 and 2026 the sun entered it on the 22nd, 23rd or 24th of August and left it on the 22nd, 23rd or 24th of September.

August's list has grown from two stones to three. The list drawn up in 1912 made sardonyx the birth-stone and peridot its alternate; today's gives peridot, spinel, the newest stone on the whole list, and sardonyx. Peridot is the gem form of olivine, and because the iron that colours it is part of the mineral rather than a trace, it is one of the few gems that only ever come in one colour, green. Spinel was mistaken for ruby for centuries: the Black Prince's Ruby, set in the front of the Imperial State Crown, is a spinel. Sardonyx is banded chalcedony, reddish-brown sard layered with white, and Roman engravers cut seals and cameos in it because a carving through the layers shows one colour against the other.

The 1912 list is the one the National Association of Jewelers adopted at Kansas City that August, as G. F. Kunz printed it in The Curious Lore of Precious Stones (1913), with a birth-stone for each month and an alternate for some; today's list is the one GIA publishes. The two lists compared →

The gladiolus and the poppy are August's flowers. Gladiolus is Latin for a little sword, from the shape of the leaves, and the plant is more South African than most people expect: most of its species are from southern Africa, and the tall garden hybrids were bred from them. The poppy's meaning was changed by the First World War. Before it, the poppy stood for sleep and death: the Greeks showed Hypnos and Thanatos, the gods of sleep and death, with the poppy, opium is made from one species of it, and Kate Greenaway's Language of Flowers of 1884 gives the white poppy as sleep. Remembrance came with John McCrae's poem of 1915, In Flanders Fields, about the poppies growing among the graves in Belgium; the American Legion adopted the poppy in 1920, and Britain held its first Poppy Day on 11 November 1921.

The meanings usually given today are a summary of the birth-flower lists printed now. The older ones are quoted from the dictionary named, under the heading it prints them. Birth flowers and the language of flowers →