Why green carnation?

We have called our company “green-carnation” in honour of Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward.

Wilde’s trademark green carnation became one of the first symbols adopted by homosexual men to identify themselves, although latterly supplanted by the pink triangle (adapted from the distinctive markings used to identify homosexual prisoners in Nazi concentration camps), the rainbow pride flag, the lambda symbol, and, more recently, the red AIDS awareness ribbon.

When asked what the green carnation signified, he replied: “Nothing whatever, but that is just what nobody will guess”. When a novel was published anonymously with the title The Green Carnation in 1894, satirising the relationship between Wilde and Bosie Douglas, and Wilde was suspected of being its author, he wrote to the Pall Mall Gazette:

I invented that magnificent flower. But with the middle-class and mediocre book that usurps its strangely beautiful name I have, I need hardly say, nothing whatsoever to do. The flower is a work of art. The book is not.

In fact, it was Wilde’s successor as the most fashionable playwright of his era - Noël Coward - who, in his 1929 musical Bittersweet, publicised green carnations as a symbol of homosexuality, with the lyrics:

Pretty boys, witty boys,
You may sneer
At our disintegration.
Haughty boys, naughty boys,
Dear, dear, dear!
Swooning with affectation ...
And as we are the reason
For the Nineties being gay,
We all wear a green carnation.

Thanks to Anthony John Hunter Morris QC