I’m told I have difficulty with colors. Without going too far into shades and hues and other color-shifting terms, is it only me confused over exactly which is what?
My July 4th celebrations usually include a patriotic red, white, and blue flower combo, but because blue is hard to pull off in our torrid summers, I usually end up with red, white, and some sorta pale purplish color, and shove a flag in for actual blue.
I say “purplish” because nobody can tell me what purple actually is. What most Americans call purple, basically anything between red and blue, British gardeners often call violet, because it is the color of flowering violets. And don’t even get me started on the over forty shades of indigo and mauve, all technically purple.
So yeah, when it comes to colors, there are clashes of opinion, to the point where I have disavowed the color wheel touted by taste-making designers and actually take issue with folks who proclaim certain color matches to be either good or bad.
Couple of examples: When I was in my socially conscious teens, I was chagrined when someone mocked how I wore a blue shirt with green trousers, saying it was unnatural. At first I felt foolishly unstylistic, until my inner Felder kicked in and say “Hang on, what’s up with green trees against the blue sky?” This came back to me during a lecture up North when a preening florist told the audience that pink and orange never go together; before taking the stage myself I quickly worked in a photo of the beautiful native purple coneflower with its orange cone and pink petals and orange cone… and commented that “I guess whoever designed this flower must have had bad taste.”
Then there’s the time-eating game my sweetheart came up with for long driving trips in which we “spot big trucks in the color of the rainbow,” always in order starting with red and on to violet. Trouble is, she’s more attuned to nuances, so we often disagree on what trucks are actually orange, and sometimes flat fall out over indigo and violet.
Our native shrub called American beautyberry (Callicarpa) has long limbs lined with golf ball-sized clusters of a color I can’t even describe, somewhere between blue-violet and magenta. The closest I can find it on the color chart used by web designers is “medium orchid” so this is what I go with.
By the way, when in the mid-1600s Isaac Newton separated different wavelengths of sunlight in a prism and labeled the rainbow colors, he only went with the indigo part because it was a common color name back then. Since learning more about spectrums, pigment scientists want indigo dropped from it entirely. Sorry, kiddoes, but there goes Roy G. Biv!
Still, I have fun playing with colors in the garden, seeing what goes with or clashes against what. Even beyond flowers, I paint hard features like pots, tire planters, fence posts, and bird houses. Nearly every year I roll a small backyard deck with a coat of whatever the trend-setting Pantone Color Institute deems the official color of the year; this keeps me challenged with mixing and matching flowers and other features to complement it. Sometimes it works, sometimes not - this year it is a rich brown called Mocha Mousse, but in 2014 it was Radiant Orchid, which turned out to be Flamingo Pink.
No this year, to a Pantone Mocha Mousse deck; I think there’s already enough brown(s) in just the mulch to suit my eye. Maybe I’ll just go with purplish. Whatever that is.
Felder Rushing is a Mississippi author, columnist, and host of the “Gestalt Gardener” on MPB Think Radio. Email gardening questions to rushingfelder@yahoo.com.
