The easy-care Sweet William can be grown very easily by sowing yourself. The usually biennial summer flower impresses with its pleasant scent and its decorative flowers in pink, red or white, single or multicolored, filled and single-flowered.

Even collected Sweet William seeds have colorful surprises in store

Do I have to buy the seeds for the Sweet William?

You can easily collect the seeds of the Sweet William from your plants yourself if you do not cut off the withered inflorescences but let them mature. If you don't want to go through this trouble or if you don't have any carnations yet, you will find a large variety of seeds in specialist shops.

Depending on your taste, you can shop online, in nurseries or in local specialty shops. Colorful mixtures with double or single flowers are often offered, but occasionally individual colors are also available. This is especially true for rarer or special colors, such as the black and red flowering variety Dianthus barbatus nigrescens "Sooty".

Are the seeds always pure in colour?

With the seeds you buy, you can be sure that you will get the colors that are shown on the bag, with a colorful mix there should be at least a certain variety of colors. Also, the plants grown will be filled or simply flowering as desired.

If, on the other hand, you sow the seeds you have collected yourself, then your experiment is like a small surprise bag, because you do not know which genetic traits of the parent plants will prevail. You can only obtain color-pure offspring of your own plants from cuttings.

Does the Sweet William sow itself?

Like many other summer flowers, the Sweet William will self-seed, provided you don't cut off all your plants after flowering. Leave some inflorescences for the seeds to mature. They fall to the ground and soon germinate. As light germinators, they do not need any special treatment by the gardener. The young carnations are relatively hardy and only need light protection from the cold.

The essentials in brief:

  • buy or collect
  • hardy
  • collected seeds are not pure in colour
  • self-seeding
  • light germinator

tips

Very "lazy" or lazy gardeners without specific color preferences can rely on the self-seeding of the Sweet William. So they always get a colorful bed of summer flowers.

Category:

Vegetable garden