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Flowers is most likely an English surname, although there are also Flowers families in the United States with German origins (from the German surname Fluer.) The English Flowers surname has three possible origins.
It may have come from the Old French word flur, which appears in Old English as flur or flour and means flower. This was a conventional term of endearment in medieval romantic poetry, and as early as the 14th Century it is regularly found as a female given name.
The name may also have been a metonymic occupational name for a miller or flour merchant, derived from the Middle English flor, flour, which has the same origin as above, with the transferred sense "flower, pick of the meal".
According to Bardsley's "Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames", Flowers is an occupational name, like Smith, Miller, or Baker, and it means one who shot a flo, or arrow. Flo-er would accordingly translate into the vernacular as "arrow shooter", and it would be a synonym of archer, bowman, or even crossbowman.
The first recorded spelling of the family name is shown to be that of William Flur, which was dated 1203, in the "Pipe Rolls of Yorkshire", during the reign of King John, 1199 - 1216. The name in England is most popular in Wiltshire, Somerset and Gloucestershire (Bristol). The surname itself first appears in the early 13th Century, while William Floere and John le Floer were mentioned in the Hundred Rolls of Devonshire in 1275; and Edmund Flour appears in the Feet of Fines of Essex in 1313.
Thomas Flower, aged 32 years, was a very early emigrant to the plantations of "Virginea", travelling aboard the ship "Abraham" in 1635.
There are several Flowers lines that have been well-documented from the earliest immigrants to the United States.
P. B. Flowers book the "Flowers Chronicles: Studies of Captain John Flower II (1595-1657), Mariner of London, Bermuda and Virginia and Some of His Descendants in the American South" documents the descendants of Captain John Flowers of Ratcliffe, Stepney Parish, London, England and many of his descendants.
http://www.flowersfamilytree.net/ has documentation on the Rafe or Ralph Flowers (1741-1821) family and its descendants.
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