A Christian legend gives the carnation a sacred origin: the first carnations were said to have sprung where the Virgin Mary's tears fell as she watched her son carry the cross, so that the pink carnation became an emblem of a mother's undying love, the reason it is the traditional flower of Mother's Day, chosen by its American founder in memory of her own mother. Carnations of particular colours took on their own meanings, the red becoming in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries a badge of labour, socialism and remembrance worn on May Day and at commemorations. Divine flower, mother's love and political emblem gather to the spicy, ruffled bloom.
The founder behind the American Mother's Day carnation was Anna Jarvis, who established the modern holiday in 1908 and specified the white carnation, her own mother's favourite flower, as its emblem, later souring on the holiday's growing commercialisation, including the flower trade she had helped create, a specific and somewhat ironic history behind a custom now followed with little thought to its origin. Carnations remain, alongside roses, among the small number of flowers bred into an enormous range of named cultivars and colours, a modern horticultural industry built on a flower already carrying divine, maternal and political meanings before the breeders ever took it up.