To pink or not to pink? John Hoyland on the flowers whose brief appearance is worth the bother. The garden is now entering its season of vigour and exuberance. The iris and peonies are showing off, the alliums seem more abundant than ever, the paulownias are looking magnificent and the roses are gearing themselves up to full flowering.
Everywhere is flamboyance, but snuggled away among this brouhaha are the discreet soft-grey mounds of old-fashioned pinks. Over the past few years, as part of an ongoing attempt to reduce my work in the garden, I have been considering that my small collection of pinks is too much bother for too little reward and that I need to clear them out. For most of the year, they are a sprawl of not-very-interesting foliage that suffers in wet summers and becomes so woody and ugly that, every few years, the plant needs to be refreshed from cuttings.
And then they flower — smothering the foliage with tiny round flowers of white, burgundy and, of course, pink, whose charm alone would earn them a place in any garden, but which bring with them a perfume as intoxicating as any rose. A small vase of Dianthus ‘Elizabethan’ sits on my desk and its sparkling white flowers with dark maroon eyes are producing a strong spicy scent with distinctive notes of clove. Pinks are forms of Dianthus plumarius and have been grown in British gardens since at least the middle of the 16th century.
(Why they are called pinks is not known for certain; it may bea reference to .
