August is here, and the Carnation Festival approaches with all its wonderful activities. Knowing we’re only days away from carnival rides, art and car shows, a pancake breakfast and spaghetti dinner and gobs of live music, kids and their adults can hardly wait!
Wheat Ridge has been celebrating its ties to the carnation (a yellow carnation adorns the festival’s logo) since the early 1900s when the area dubbed itself the “Carnation Capital.” By the mid-20th century 32 greenhouses operated here, and by the Sixties local growers were sending bouquets of carnations to the White House weekly.
Sadly, flower production waned in the late 20th century as air shipping became cheaper and growers in South America dominated the market. The city’s last carnation business closed in 2008. However, Wheat Ridge continues to honor its heritage with the Carnation Festival, started in 1970 to commemorate the first anniversary of the city’s incorporation.
The flower itself is thousands of years old, first recorded in Greece and throughout Aisa Minor and Persia. Greeks gave the flower its modern classification: Greek botanist Theophrastus named the flower “dianthus”, from the Greek words “dios” (divine) and “anthos” (flower). And what a divine flower it was, commonly woven into ceremonial crowns and displayed at festive occasions. Early carnations had a pungent clove-like scent; the adopted genus and (later) species names are “Dianthus caryophyllus” – logical, as the Latin name for clove is “caryophyllus aromaticus”. Romans gave the flower its common name “carnation,” from the Latin “corona,” meaning a wreath, garland or crown; it was also used in Rome’s great ceremonies to honor emperors.
Skip forward a few hundred years to the late thirteenth century when records show monks cultivated the flower, saving seeds of the stronger and more attractive plants. Carnations grew in popularity and were associated with several historical events, particularly in France. After Marie Antoinette was imprisoned, associates hatched “The Carnation Plot” wherein they smuggled messages to her wrapped tightly in carnation bouquets; the plot was discovered, and, well, Marie lost her head.
Years later Napoleon used red carnations to decorate the ribbons of the Legion of Honor; however, those same red flowers were also worn in the buttonholes of nobles about to be guillotined, and at the same time the white carnation was the symbol of the monarchy. Later in the nineteenth century the red flower became the symbol of the socialist movement.
Secret messaging was popular during the Victorian era in both England and America where women often responded to secret admirers with a carnation of either a solid color (“Yes!”), a striped one (“Alas, I cannot…”), or a yellow blossom (“No!”). Lastly, consider poor President William McKinley who adopted the red carnation as his lucky flower, frequently wearing it on his lapel. Following his 1901 assassination, Ohio (where he was born) adopted the red carnation as its state flower, an appropriate role for a royal bloom.
