How To Grow Garden Pinks

With their evocative clove-like scent, garden pinks are available in a range of colours and last all summer long

- Anne Swithinbank

GARDENERS often ask for short, colourful, fragrant, evergreen perennials capable of flowering all summer long, and the modern pink certainly delivers. Unlike the once-blooming old-fashioned pinks (probably derived from Dianthus plumarius), modern varieties produce their flower stems over several weeks while retaining that clove-like scent.

I use them to edge pathways in our kitchen garden, as the petals (minus the bitter green base) are edible. We add them to herbal teas, use them to decorate salads, and when crystallised, they look pretty on cakes. Longstemmed pinks are great for the cutting garden too, their blooms interwoven with annuals like nigella (love-in-a-mist) and orlaya.