September, 1911 



THE GARDEN MAGAZINE 



55 



here with the English Malmaisons, nor 

 with the grand outdoor varieties." 



Anyone who is "daffy" on wall garden- 

 ing ought to try the original carnation or 

 clove pink {Dianthus caryophyllus) , a pale 

 lilac flower which grows wild in Normandy 

 and on the ruins of Rochester castle in Eng- 

 land. Many flowers that are not hardy in 

 the level garden are hardy in low retaining 

 walls, e. g., snapdragons and wallflowers. 



SWEET WILLIAMS 



As the carnation is at the top of one line 

 of development in the genus Dianthus, so 

 is the sweet William at the top of another, 

 for it has the largest clusters, often four 

 inches across and containing twenty to 

 thirty flowers. Also this species (D. bar- 

 batus), has a greater genius for variegation 

 than any other, so much so that we sel- 

 dom see self-colored sweet Williams, save 

 the white, pink and crimson. The price 

 which the sweet William pays for this 

 showiness is a short season of bloom, 

 uninteresting foliage, diminished fragrance 

 and a short term of life, for it is practically 

 an annual. True, the plant will last 

 several years, but it gives its best bloom 

 the second season, and since it is most 

 convenient to sow the seeds in July for 

 bloom the next June it is customary to 

 call the sweet William a biennial. However 

 biennials are quite as much care as annuals, 

 for we cannot have them every year un- 

 less we sow them every year. 



John Thorpe complained that hardly 

 any improvement had been made in sweet 

 Williams in thirty years, and he spoke 

 fondly of Hunt's strain, which had flowers 

 as large as a quarter and of clear, decided 

 colors. Surely there is nothing very gloat- 

 worthy in the ordinary five-cent package, 

 but when the collector opens his French 

 and German catalogues he is staggered 

 by the immense variety. "The points 



The fringed, or night-scented. Dink (D. superbus) 

 is closely related to the garden pink, but has the 

 petals cut below the middle 



the florist improver aims at," says Robin- 

 son, "are a circular flower, with no inden- 

 tation where the petals meet, thick in 

 petal, and with all the petals marked alike, 

 the colors meeting each other in clearly 

 defined lines without any feathering or 

 flushing into each other. " American stan- 

 dards in flowers are never so high as the 

 European, and their standards seem too 

 exacting and artificial to our beginners. 

 Hunt gave great attention to getting round 

 trusses and smooth-edged flowers. A pop- 

 ular strain at present is the Auricula-eyed, 

 in which the flowers have a clear white 

 eye surrounded by red, scarlet, crimson, 

 violet or maroon. The double flowers 

 last longer but are rather lumpy and the 

 colors are less pronounced. 



The sweet William is particularly ef- 

 fective in formal gardens, especially in 

 company with other formal flowers such 

 as foxgloves and larkspurs. Unfortunately 

 a bed of sweet Williams leaves a big gap 

 when it passes out of bloom, and it is a 

 shabby plant in winter, so that one needs 

 the ingenuity of a Duncan Finlayson or a 

 Mrs. Francis King to think out satis- 

 factory ways of combining it with other 

 plants. By the way, reader, what is the 

 best scheme you know? 



OTHER CLUSTERED FLOWERS 



The relatives of the sweet William are 

 an alluring set to the collector, but in real 

 life I have found them rather disappointing. 

 For instance the blood pink (Dianthus 

 cruentus), pictured on page 56 is very 

 consistently colored and has a certain 

 diminutive beauty of flower, but makes 

 no show compared with a sweet William 

 and the color is a rather acute crimson. 

 The stems are too tall and weak and the 

 plant is hideous about the seventh of June, 

 for the buds are so brown that the plant 

 looks as if it had gone to seed. Perhaps 

 I do injustice to this plant for the artistic 

 way to use it may be to naturalize it in 

 meadows. I once saw a ghastly attempt 

 to make sweet Williams look like wild 

 flowers by planting them in the tall grass, 

 but they were too eternally variegated. 

 Possibly this blood pink would hold its 

 own better and make mystic spots of color 

 amid the sober heads of timothy and other 

 grasses as the cardinal flower does beside 

 the water. 



In the same way some one ought to 

 try the Carthusian pink (D. Carthusian- 

 orum), which grows naturally amid grass 

 and in dry places. It has carmine flowers, 

 attains eight to sixteen inches (or half the 

 height of the blood pink) and is considered 

 one of the easiest to grow. 



The dark red pink (D. atrorubens), is 

 considered a synonym of the preceding 

 by Bailey, but Correvon says it is an al- 

 pine form of the Carthusian pink with 

 taller stems (nineteen to twenty-eight 

 inches),, numerous flowers in large heads, 

 longer and narrower petals, and a very 

 deep red. 



The broad-leaved pink (D. lalifolius) 

 has the foliage of a sweet William but 



the flowers are fewer and the cluster 

 rather ragged. However, it has a large 

 flower of a very good dark red, and 

 if the plant is longer-lived than the 

 sweet William it is worth having in 

 one's border. 



The most celebrated, however, of these 

 clustered flowers is D. cinnabarinus, for 

 cinnabar red is a unique color in this genus. 

 Unhappily this species is probably lost to 

 cultivation. The name appears in every 

 good catalogue but I have never been 

 able to get the real thing and Correvon 

 says he had it only once and lost it. 



CHINESE, JAPANESE OR ANNUAL PINKS 



We now come to those little master- 

 pieces of. showiness which "every child 

 should know" — the Chinese, Japanese or 

 annual pinks. These will bloom more 

 quickly and surely from seed than any 

 other hardy Dianthus, for plants sown 

 outdoors in April will bloom in August. 

 It is more satisfactory, however, to sow 

 them indoors in March and have them 

 begin blooming in July, or else treat them 

 as biennials, i. e., you sow them in May or 

 June in the vegetable garden and trans- 

 plant them to their permanent quarters 

 where they will bloom the second year. 

 Sometimes they will endure a second winter, 

 but the third season of bloom is not good 

 enough, as a rule. They are wonders for 

 producing big masses of color, but unfor- 

 tunately most of them are nearly or quite 

 devoid of fragrance. 



All these pinks belong to one great 

 species which the catalogues call D. Sin- 

 ensis, but which we ought to spell D. 

 Chinensis, because Linnaeus wrote it so. 

 The seedsmen love to Latinize the names of 

 their strains, which is very confusing to a 



Sweet William (D. barbatus) has the biggest 

 flowers of all the clustered varieties and the widest 

 range of color 



