What flower did Anna Jarvis choose as the emblem of Mother's Day?

Anna Jarvis chose the carnation as the emblem of Mother’s Day.

At the first widely recognized Mother’s Day service, held on May 10, 1908, in Grafton, West Virginia, Jarvis sent 500 white carnations for attendees. The flower had special personal meaning: carnations were her late mother Ann Reeves Jarvis’s favorite flower. The white carnation consequently became the original symbol of the holiday and of remembrance for mothers.

Jarvis envisioned Mother’s Day as a personal, sentimental observance rather than a commercial gift-buying occasion. People wore or displayed carnations, wrote personal messages, and honored their mothers through church services and family gatherings. Later customs often associated white carnations with deceased mothers and red or pink carnations with living mothers, although those color conventions were not the whole of Jarvis’s original idea.

The flower also illustrates the conflict Jarvis developed with the holiday’s commercial growth. Florists promoted carnations heavily and raised prices around Mother’s Day, prompting Jarvis to protest what she saw as exploitation of her memorial occasion.