Begin the year with Carnations, the January Flowers

Everything feels cold and dreary in the month of January all over this hemisphere. A strange way to begin the year, with the sun going down earlier, the breeze cold and uninviting. We expect beginnings to be bright and sunny, mirroring the optimism in our hearts for better days and personal development. But the flowers that bloom even under such harsh, inhospitable conditions are a better show of optimism than those that grow under ideal conditions.

The flower of this month is the beautiful carnation. Every month we recognize a flower for its beauty and symbolic meaning. Decorating your home with the month’s flowers is a great way to have variety in decor without creating waste.

Carnations have a long history as a symbol of love, strength, and remembrance.

Love

The red carnation is central to the popular musical Hadestown, a retelling of the love story of Eurydice and Orpheus. The former, a young girl forced to work in the Greek underworld to escape poverty and the latter, the boy who loves her enough to venture to the dangerous underworld to rescue her.

The flowers are known to bloom in the biting cold of winter, symbolizing a love that endures hardships.

Carnations are traditionally the flowers for the first wedding anniversary, making them an apt gift for the occasion for yourself or a couple you know who is celebrating their first year of marriage.

Now, carnations are rather beautiful and a great expression of love. But if your loved one has (or is) cats or dogs, it’s best to avoid carnations. They are mildly toxic, causing gastrointestinal issues (vomiting, loss of appetite) and mild dermatitis (skin inflammation resulting in redness, rashes, etc.)

Luck

While Shamrocks are most popularly associated with St. Patrick’s Day, the Irish Holiday, green carnations are among other popular botanicals used in celebrations. Green is an unconventional color for flowers, symbolizing uniqueness. So, it also makes a good gift for those in your life who take the untrodden path and make life more interesting.

Know someone working hard on their exams? A little bit of floral help towards their graduation would be much appreciated. This tradition comes from the University of Oxford where students wear carnations of three different colors throughout the exam season. White on the first day of the exams, red on the final day, and pink for all the other days in between. What a relief it must be to wear red…

Former US President William McKinley was also known to wear carnations for luck, the flowers becoming the symbol of his home state after his demise.

Parental Love

Anna Jarvis, who founded Mother’s Day in memory of her own mother, chose carnations to symbolize the eternal and undying love of mothers. She chose white carnations for the purity of a mother’s love for her children. Today, white carnations are worn to remember mothers who have passed on. Red for mothers who are still with us.

Korea celebrates Parents’ Day together to show love and respect for both mothers and fathers. A single carnation is pinned to the right side of one’s shirt– red when both parents are alive, pink for someone mourning one deceased parent, and white for those who have lost both parents.

Carnations in Literature

They’re known to be Shakespeare’s favorite flowers. They appear in A Winter’s Tale, characters  Perdita and Polixenes debating on their beauty, the former calling it the fairest flowers of the season. She also considers them inferior for they’re hybrids and created not by nature, but by human intervention.

If you ask me, human intervention makes the flowers more beautiful than if they were purely naturally occurring. Aren’t humans part of nature, too? Intervening to create more beauty out of the beauty we were already born into. It could also be the perfect representation of romantic love, shared between strangers who met and forged together a union of love as compared to a more naturally occurring familial love.

In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet gives Romeo a white carnation to show her love.

It wasn’t just Shakespeare. Irish writer and poet Oscar Wilde, who famously wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray, wore a green carnation. 

A Flower Inspiring Change

Labor movements have often used the red carnation as a symbol of the struggle for worker rights. The red here doesn’t symbolize romance as it usually does for flowers, but for the blood shed in the struggle for human rights. It is January, but remember to use the flowers for May Day celebrations. 

They are also popularly associated with the Carnation Revolution, the 1974 revolution in Portugal for democracy. It also marked the third wave of democracy in many other countries. 

Carnations are the national flower of Slovenia and also given to women for the celebration of Slovenian Women’s Day. 

At Fys Flowers, we have a variety of arrangements from bouquets to innovative baskets and boxed arrangements for easy care. Get carnations from Fys Flowers stores located in Sharjah and Dubai where our dedicated staff will help you put together the perfect flower arrangements. Order online from anywhere in the UAE for easy flower delivery.