Anna Jarvis is considered the founder of Mother’s Day in America. The story goes that after her mother, whom she was very close with, passed away, Anna vowed to create a day dedicated to honoring mothers both alive and deceased.
As a young girl living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Anna and her mother cared for a garden full of white carnations – her mother’s favorite flowers. In 1907, Anna delivered 500 white carnations to the church her mother taught Sunday school in. She then requested that each mother in the congregation get one as they arrived to church that week. Every year after that, the church upheld the tradition and continued to hand out carnations at their Mother’s Day service. Neighboring communities and churches soon took notice of this act, and began incorporating it into their own Mother’s Day services. In the mid 1940s, carnations were dubbed the official Mother’s Day flower.
Anna Jarvis once said that white carnations were the symbol of Mother’s Day, because they were thought to “typify some of the virtues of motherhood; … whiteness stands for purity; its lasting qualities, faithfulness; its fragrance, love; its wide field of growth, charity; its form, beauty…”
Overtime, different colored carnations began to take on their own meanings. Because of their history, fragrance, and “heavenly soft” texture, white carnations became popularly thought of as the flowers you left at the grave site of a mother who had passed away. And even though it was white carnations that originally became popular, red carnations are also considered the official Mother’s Day flower. However, red carnations are believed to be a gift for mothers who are still alive, as it was believed carnations’ deep red petals represented that of a beating heart and love, rather than loss.