by James Alexander-Sinclair
This week I've been thinking about pinks - or Dianthus if you prefer.
This week I've been thinking about pinks - or Dianthus if you prefer. I was spurred into this train of thought by the arrival of a catalogue full of the things from a nursery in Sussex. Initially I dismissed pinks as terribly old-fashioned and a bit grannyish but quickly slapped myself and stopped being too much of a poncey designer. Especially as I notice that the nursery is run by a woman with a pierced eyebrow and visible tattoos: not the image one expects!
True, my grandmother did grow them, but then she also grew a lot of other things universally regarded as supremely tasteful and fashionable. Dianthus make a very charming edging plant with lots of colour (provided you like pink) and most of them are fabulously scented. If you don't like pink, your safest bet is the white double Dianthus 'Mrs Sinkins' which smells like the wrists of wood nymphs. It's one of the old garden pinks (great scent, short flowering season, most of them about 30cm high) and was originally bred in 1868 by John Sinkins (whose day job was to be Master of the Slough Workhouse - rather like the Beadle in Oliver Twist).
Interestingly, the colour pink may well be named after the flower. Pinks existed in cultivation for at least two hundred years before the first record of the word.
It's relatively simple to breed new pinks so, over the years, many variations have emerged. Singles, doubles, spotted, lace-edged, miniatures and some that are a combination of all these and look a bit like tumble-dried rosy lapdogs. One of the most famous and long flowering is D. 'Doris', which was developed just after the war and smells deliciously of cloves.
Dianthus like a sunny spot with lots of drainage. They don't like to be too crowded out and the longer flowering varieties will, with regular deadheading, keep going until the autumn. Propagation is also quite simple: take cuttings from the non-flowering shoots in the summer.
I haven't even started on alpine and annual varieties but must mention D. carthusianorum - a really good perennial, about 45cm tall, with tiny flowers on long stems as delicate as the legs of a newborn giraffe. It goes beautifully with grasses.
Unsurprisingly, pinks don't come in blue, orange or yellow - although it's possible to dye the flowers by leaving a cut stalk in ink for a while (how else did Oscar Wilde get a green carnation?)
See more comments...
