Rensselaer Union, Volume 6, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 April 1874 — FLORICULTURE.- THE DIANTHUS. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

FLORICULTURE.- THE DIANTHUS.

An eminent florist says of the dianthus that it is “a splendid genus of'the most beautiful perennials grown.” As it blooms the | first year from seed, it is usually classed among annuals in the catalogues. In this family of plants are the sweet-william (dianthus barbatus),fhe carnation and picotee (dianthus coryophyllm), and the blue foliaged, fragrant garden pink or| dianthus hortensis. It is the object of this article to treat more espe-, cially of dianthus Chinensis or the Chinese pink, including dianthus Heddewigii and lacinatus comparatively recent introductions from the islands of Japan. Should any reader imagine these italicised

words difficult to pronounce, and on that account skip them, let him now go back, study them carefully, and learn to master that much botanical Latin. The dianthus is recommended to nmatenrs and beginners in floriculture because it is easy to grow, perfectly hardy, and a splendid, brilliant flower. Inbeauty it ranks next the rose and the lilly, while its fragrance is unsurpassed by either. The colors of the dianthus are the richest that can be imagined, without being eaudy. The blendings, stripir.gs, markings and contrasts of color in these flowers are the most delicate, the most effective, and the most exquisitely perfect in nature ; nothing in art compares with them. Dianthus is a Greek name, meaning Jove’s own flower. Botanists call the family of which it is a member, the Carynphyllacce-, which Gray describes as “Bland herbs, with opposite and entire leaves, regular flowers with not over ten stamens, a commonly one-eellod ovary with the ovules rising from the bottom of the cell on a central column, and with two to five stiles or sessile stigmas, mostly separate to the base. Seeds with a slender embryo on the outside of a mealy albumen, and usually curved into a ring around it. Calyx persistent. Divides into two great divisions or suborders, viz. the true Pink Family and the Chickweed Family.” The dianthus belongs to the first named family, which is thus further described by the same author: “Sepals (five) united below into* a tube or cup. Petals with slender claws which are enclosed in the calyx-tube, and commonly raised within it, with the ten stamens, on a sort of stalk, olten with.a cleft scale or crown at the junction of the blade and daw. Pod mostly opening at the top, many seeded.” But one variety-of this family has been found growing wild in the United States, and it is a small-flowered, insignificant plant, supposed to have deteriorated from the Depford pink of Europe. The cut at the hea’d of this article was furnished through the kindness of Mr. James Vick, the famous Rochester, N. Y., seidsman arnTflorist, and is an accurate representation in black of a single flower and also of a plant of the double Chinese pink, or dianthus laciniatus Jtore ple.no. It grows from six inches to fifteen inches in hight, produces flowers from July until after hard frosts in the fall, which are very large, sometimes being more than three inches in diameter, and of many combinations or markings of the different shades of red with white and black. Seed :nay be sown now out doors in any good garden soil, but a mh\ture of about equal parts sand and prairie loam is best. In the fall after the ground freezes throw over the bed a thin scattering of leaves, straw or coarse manure —not too deep, however—which may be raked off late in April. Seed sown late in the spring, or early in the fall, will produce strong young plants lor the second season's blooming Plants may also be obtained by dividing roots, and by layering. The dianthus is'a good house plan t, if not kept too warm.