Garden Plants - Dianthus

This is one of those many named plants: dianthus, carnation, pink, Sweet William - you pays your money and you takes your choice!

The oldest name, and the oldest definition, comes from Theophrastus, who called the flower the dianthus dios = divine and anthos = flower. Then it gets a bit more contested. Some scholarly types insist that the later name carnation comes from corone = flower garland, and is the same root as the word coronation = to be garlanded or crowned. Others insist that it comes from carnis = flesh, relating to the pink colour, or even incarnacyon = incarnation, referring to a God made flesh - I think they've probably been indulging in mind-altering substances to think up that one!

Pinks first came to Britain in the 1500s and it would be logical to assume they were named 'pink' because they were pink, wouldn't it? But that's another slippery bit of etymology - in fact the world pink didn't relate to a specific colour until the eighteenth century and the colour was almost certainly named after the flower rather than vice versa. Did you know that until the same period, baby boys were dressed in 'carmine' (what we'd call red or pink) and baby girls in blue? Bet you didn't!

Anyway - pink probably comes from the middle English term poinken = to pierce or make holes, and later came to mean to decorate the edges of cloth or leather, and then would have been applied to the regular jagged pattern that is seen on the edge of dianthus petals - and we still call scissors that cut a zigzag edge, pinking shears.

The name clove pink is probably derived from clou de girofle or 'nail of the clove tree' - this is because the distinctive smell of the dianthus is similar to that of the spice, clove and a clove is shaped like a Crucifixion nail. In a lot of paintings, the baby Jesus is shown as holding a carnation, as a foreshadowing of his terrible future fate. Given that association, it's somewhat surprising that the plant is a symbol of marital bliss and fecundity around the world.

Garden Dianthus photograph by twoblueday, used under a creative commons attribution licence