Sweet William

Last week it was pansies. This week it’s the carnation. Lately I’m all about defending mistreated flowers. Carnations have sort of a bad image. They’re hospital flowers. They get stuck in buttonholes, not because people like them, but because they aren’t messy. Stiff and sort of sterile, like fake flowers. But they used to be very popular in Victorian gardens, and even today you don’t have to look very hard to find really cute varieties.

When you bother to look close at the intricate petals, you also notice that they are fragrant. Carnations have a really unusual, but pleasant, sort of peppery scent. It’s quite masculine for a floral – maybe that’s how they first became associated with boutonnières. It might also account for their older common name, Sweet William. Isn’t that a much nicer name than carnation? Doesn’t it make you think of snuggling a just-washed little boy? Or resting your head on the shoulder of someone warm and sort of peppery smelling?