Dianthus superbus Seeds | Fringed Pink
LATIN NAME: Dianthus superbus
COMMON NAME: Fringed Pink
Plant Profile
The genus name means flower of Zeus, and the specific epithet means superb, which is a lot of confidence for a meadow plant. Once the flower is open, the claim is easier to accept, because the petal limb is divided into narrow threads for a third of its length or more, so the bloom looks as though someone has taken scissors to it.
Under the petals sits a tube formed from fused sepals, and at its base a ring of small bracts forms an epicalyx, a character shared across the pink family. The corolla tube is long, which restricts the flowers to visitors with a matching tongue, and the calyx has five teeth. After flowering the ovary swells into a capsule that opens at the top by four teeth, and the seed is shaken out as the stalk sways in the wind.
The long corolla tube and the evening scent are two halves of the same arrangement. A moth with a tongue long enough to reach the nectar at the base of the tube has to press its head against the stamens to get there, and the pollen is transferred on the next flower it visits. Daylight visitors find the tube closed to them.
The species has thirty chromosomes, a count that places it among the higher-ploid pinks, and breeders have crossed it with other members of the genus to widen the fringe further. The strain named Rainbow Loveliness, raised in an English garden in the last century, is the best known of those crosses and the one most often offered as fringed pink seed.
Science & Biotechnology
The plant earns its place twice over, as a cut flower with an evening perfume and as the dried herb qu mai, used in the Chinese materia medica.
Cut stems in the evening, when the scent is strongest, and condition them in deep, cool water before arranging. The flowers are short-lived once open, so the practical approach is to cut a few stems at a time over several weeks rather than the whole plant at once, and to leave most of the spikes to set seed in the garden.
Uses & Benefits
In Japan the plant grows as a distinct form with a longer calyx tube, and it is the nadeshiko of classical poetry and of the phrase yamato nadeshiko, an image of the idealised Japanese woman. The flowers are picked in the Japanese countryside in late summer, and the wild form is far more thread-petalled than most garden strains now sold.
The pink family has a perfume that is easy to recognise and hard to mistake: a clove note carried mainly by eugenol, with benzenoid esters such as methyl benzoate and the sesquiterpene beta-caryophyllene filling out the blend. In fringed pink the release peaks in the evening, which is exactly when the moths that pollinate it are flying.
The dried aerial parts are used in decoction as a diuretic in the Chinese tradition, usually alongside other herbs rather than alone. The same plant that pollinates at dusk in a meadow is therefore harvested in quantity in parts of East Asia, and the two uses rarely meet in the same conversation.
Growing from Seed
Pinks want sun and air, and the fringed species is no exception. Choose a site in full sun with ground that drains within hours of rain, and improve the bed with grit rather than with rich compost, since overfed plants flop and rot at the crown.
Sow the seed finely over the prepared surface and cover it with a bare film of soil, then water with a fine rose and keep the surface just damp. As soon as the seedlings can be handled, set them out 25 cm apart, and plant them so the crown sits at the surface rather than below it.
Deadhead regularly to keep new flowers coming, and take heel cuttings in early summer from the shoots that have not flowered, because individual plants are often short lived. Slugs graze the young growth, aphids gather on the stems in dry spells, and a rust that marks the leaves with pustules appears in humid seasons.
Our Take
The genus rewards a collector, since the differences between the species are mostly in the petal and the scent. The Chinese Dianthus chinensis is the summer-flowering relative with the same fringed look, Sweet William brings the genus into a biennial border plant, and carnations show where the family scent was bred for the cut-flower trade.
Related Reading
Gardeners who grow Fringed Pink often pair it with these related subjects: