Question

Which plant is described by these clues? Slice an unripe fruit across and the seed chamber is a single undivided cavity, the seeds attached to a free column standing up its middle and touching the wall nowhere. Each of its five petals narrows abruptly to a long stalk-like base gripped down inside the {calyx}, and the outer edge is fringed rather than plain. Its leaves come in opposite pairs at conspicuously swollen joints, and the stem snaps cleanly at those joints. The {sepal}s are fused into a firm cylindrical tube, and a pair or more of small leafy scales sits pressed flat against the outside of its base. Two slender {style}s emerge from the mouth of that tube, not three and not five. Its flowers are crowded many together into a dense flat-topped head 3 to 5 inches (7 to 13 cm) across, not carried one or two to a stem. Its leaves are broad, flat, lance-shaped and plain green, not narrow, grey-blue and grass-like. Individual blooms are small, about 0.5 inch (1.3 cm) across, in white, pink, red, salmon or purple, very often with a contrasting eye and a fine picotee edging. It lives exactly two years: a flat evergreen rosette the first summer, a flowering stem in the second, then death, with no third-year regrowth from the root. The epithet means bearded, for the fringed margins of the petals. The flowers carry a light clove scent, and this has been a staple of English cottage gardens since at least the 1500s, standing behind a great many of the modern border strains grown today.

Accepted Answer

Dianthus barbatus

Name That Plant #119