Are our carnations and streaked gillyvors.
The Winter's Tale IV, iv
In fact, Perdita declines to have gillyvors in her garden, since their beauty owes so much to art rather than to nature. In what sounds like a very modern dispute, Polixenes chides her for this attitude, pointing out that hybrids could not be created without nature's cooperation.
To add to the confusion, the ancients also called several other fragrant flowers from different families by the same name. Stocks (matthiola) were "stock gillyflowers," wallflowers (cheiranthus), "wall gillyflowers," and sweet rocket (hesperis), "Queen's gillyflower."
Back then, people had an equally relaxed attitude toward spelling, with the word being written as gylofre, gillofloure, gelyflower, gelouer, gelefleure, and even July flower. The term is supposed to be a corruption of the French "giroflee," which means "a clove."
In this article, however, I will confine myself to the "clove gillyflowers" or dianthus, also known as carnations, sops in wine, pagiants, blunket, or, strangely enough, "horseflesh."
Explanations for the plant's common names vary as widely as the spelling. "Carnation" may spring from "coronation," since the flowers were often used in chaplets. As the poet, Drayton, put it:
Whose kind height the Carnation,
For sweetness of most sovereign power,
Shall help my wreath to fashion.
On the other hand, the name might equally well have come from the Greek "carnis" or "flesh," in reference to the flower's original color. Another possibility is the Greek "incarnacyn" or "incarnation," since dianthus literally means "divine flower."
According to tradition, pinks sprang up from the tears Mary shed as she followed her Son to Calvary. So the pink carnation, the official symbol of mother's day, stands for maternal undying love.
The term "pinks" may derive from the German "pinksten" or "pfingsten," or from the "pinked" (jagged) edges of the blooms. It did not come from the hue, since the color "pink" was named after the flower--and not the other way around!
Almost all members of the dianthus family have a heavenly countenance and scent. Despite their delicate appearance, these are very tough flowers! They sprout easily from seed, require only well-drained limey soil with lots of sun, and are seldom bothered by bugs or disease.
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