Carnations: meaning by colour, vase life and value

Carnations give more days in a vase per euro than any other flower sold in Ireland. Two weeks is ordinary and three happens regularly, at a price that undercuts everything except chrysanthemums. Florists know this, which is why carnations are in so much of the work they sell and so rarely on the front of the website.

The flower's reputation in Ireland is stuck somewhere around 1985, filling out a garage forecourt bunch beside a spray of gypsophila. That is a memory of how they were arranged, not a judgement on the flower.

What carnations mean

Affection, broadly, with the colours doing the specific work.

• Pink carries a mother's love, and this is the meaning behind the carnation's place in Mother's Day traditions.
• Red is admiration, deep red closer to love.
• White is pure affection and good luck, and in Irish and British funeral work white carnations are standard in wreaths and sprays.
• Yellow meant rejection or disappointment in the Victorian language of flowers, which is trivia rather than a live convention, though it is quoted often enough to give a florist pause.
• Striped meant refusal in the same Victorian lists. Nobody alive reads them that way.

The carnation is also the flower of remembrance for several political traditions in Europe, most visibly in Portugal, where red carnations mark the 1974 revolution. That does not carry any weight in Ireland.

Season in Ireland

There is no Irish carnation season. The cut flower trade grows them in Colombia, Kenya, Turkey and Dutch glasshouses, and the supply is level every week of the year, which is part of why the price never moves much either.

Garden pinks, the smaller scented relatives, do grow in Irish gardens through June and July, and they are a different proposition: short stems, real clove scent, and a week in a small vase. If someone offers you those from a garden, take them.

When to send them, and when not to

Carnations are the right answer when the flowers have to last: a hospital stay, a nursing home, an office reception, a house where nobody is going to be attentive about vase water. A bunch that still looks well after two weeks does more for the person receiving it than one that peaks on day three.

They also suit sympathy work in Ireland, where they are standard in wreaths and sprays and where longevity is a practical virtue.

Do not send carnations alone as a romantic gesture, not because of any meaning but because of what the flower signals here about how much thought went in. Do not use the very cheap dyed ones for anything that matters. And if you want scent, look elsewhere: most modern carnations have had it bred out in favour of transport tolerance, and freesias or sweet pea will do what you want instead.

Care

Look at the stem before you cut. A carnation stem has swollen joints at intervals, and a cut through one of those nodes takes up water badly. Cut in the gap between two nodes, on a slant.

Strip the lower leaves and keep the water shallow to medium. Carnations are not heavy drinkers.

They are unusually sensitive to ethylene, the gas ripening fruit gives off. A bowl of bananas on the same table will close the buds and shorten the flowers by days. Move one or the other.

Change the water every third day rather than every second: the stems are clean and the water lasts. Pinch off spent flowers on a spray carnation and the remaining buds keep opening, which is where the third week comes from.

Cool matters more than anything else. A hall or a north-facing room will get you a fortnight without much effort. See the vase life by flower table for how far ahead of the rest that is.