It is hard to call a flower as dainty and attractive as the Deptford pink invasive. It seems incapable of threatening anything, but it is a plant originally native to Europe now growing with ease throughout most of North America, and it fits the definition. The plant has roots that lead back to the English town of Deptford.

Back in Tudor times, Deptford was a rural community on the outskirts of London where the plant was found in great abundance. Sadly, though the Deptford pink is still widespread throughout Europe, Deptford itself is now far more industrialized and subsumed by modern London, with far fewer locations for its namesake flower to call home.

Young pinks may have crossed the Atlantic growing among the roots of ornamental or commercial plant species being exported to the New World, or perhaps they hitched their way here as seeds among grains intended for livestock feed. I like to think that a plant this attractive might have even been brought here deliberately in the hopes of taming it for cultivation. In any case, as one of the New World’s oldest settlements, New York City may very well have been one of its first stops en route to naturalization in North America.

Like many other colonizers, the pink’s progeny established themselves and thrived. The Deptford pink (Dianthus armeria) is not in the same league as more famous and rapacious invaders like phragmites, mugwort or bittersweet. In fact, the skinny-leaved plant usually behaves well, mixing invisibly into the weedy wildflowers and vegetation of dry fields. That is, until it blooms.