Carnation

The carnation, Dianthus caryophyllus, is a clove-scented flower long cultivated from a Mediterranean pink; its genus name, Dianthus, means the flower of Zeus or the divine flower, given by Theophrastus. That divine name shaped its standing as a flower of love and fascination in the classical and later European world, and its spicy fragrance made it, in the Middle Ages, a substitute for the costly clove in flavouring wine, whence some of its old names. As a garden flower it became one of the most bred and various of blooms.

The carnation gave its name to an entire modern revolution: Portugal's bloodless overthrow of its authoritarian government on 25 April 1974 is known worldwide as the Carnation Revolution, after the carnations that flower-sellers and civilians placed in the barrels of soldiers' rifles and on their uniforms as the army sided with the uprising, a strikingly literal case of a flower of love and fascination becoming, in a single day, a symbol of peaceful political change. The carnation's durability as a cut flower, capable of lasting weeks rather than days in water, also made it one of the first flowers to be commercially bred and shipped internationally on a large scale, a practical trait behind its ubiquity in modern floristry.

A Christian legend gives the carnation a sacred origin: the first carnations were said to have sprung where the Virgin Mary's tears fell as she watched her son carry the cross, so that the pink carnation became an emblem of a mother's undying love, the reason it is the traditional flower of Mother's Day, chosen by its American founder in memory of her own mother. Carnations of particular colours took on their own meanings, the red becoming in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries a badge of labour, socialism and remembrance worn on May Day and at commemorations. Divine flower, mother's love and political emblem gather to the spicy, ruffled bloom.

The founder behind the American Mother's Day carnation was Anna Jarvis, who established the modern holiday in 1908 and specified the white carnation, her own mother's favourite flower, as its emblem, later souring on the holiday's growing commercialisation, including the flower trade she had helped create, a specific and somewhat ironic history behind a custom now followed with little thought to its origin. Carnations remain, alongside roses, among the small number of flowers bred into an enormous range of named cultivars and colours, a modern horticultural industry built on a flower already carrying divine, maternal and political meanings before the breeders ever took it up.