What Colour is Alma?

Picture by Joan Hall, Creative Commons

When I was first planning my magenta border, I knew that I would have to have some asters to finish off the season. There are a lot of good ones out there, and one in particular, aster novae-angliae 'Andenken an Alma Pötschke' sounded great. Both Sarah Raven and Christopher Lloyd described it as 'magenta'. Nobody else did, but then people tend to shy off that particular word. Everyone agreed it was a great plant.

More Impurity

On the subject of "impure blue", I saw the following discussion on GardenWeb, and enjoyed it immensely, although one sentence from Kirk Johnson really stood out:

Blue is one color and purple is blue with red thrown in. Why do all the gardening publications insist on calling purple "blue" when they don't call orange "red"? Why pretend?

Silene Coronaria and Geranium 'Patricia'

Rose campion and Armenian geranium make a perfect pairing. The campion, with its fuzzy silver stems makes an upright contrast to the mound of finely-cut geranium foliage spangled with dark-eyed magenta flowers. The flowers on the campion are, if anything, even more vivid than the geranium’s, almost a fluorescent pink. See them together here and here.

Geranium psilostemon, Wikipedia Commons, photo by Frank Vincentz

The two come from the same part of the world, too. Lychnis is native to southern and central Europe and central Asia, while geranium psilostemon comes from Armenia and the surrounding Caucasian territories.

Silene coronaria, Wikipedia Commons, photo by Udo Schröter 

There are those who would say that this is a eye-hurting combination. The word I would use is “showy”, and who doesn't want a bit of pizazz in the garden?

Primary Colours: good or bad?

Many years ago, I planted out blue and yellow Dutch irises. When they came up in the spring, next to the geum, I was horrified.. I maintained you couldn't have all three primary colours together. My then husband thought it was great, and took this picture. Friends and family also thought it looked good. Was I being too precious?

Geums and irises. Photo by Simon Ross.

Coreopsis

I have to confess right away that the main coreopsis I have grown is pink. This puts me in a poor position for defending the yellow daisies. The one I grew was 'Heaven's Gate', a cultivar of coreopsis rosea, and it was such a perfect colour I was willing to keep buying it year after year, since it never survived winter in Northern England.

It was only after one year when I planted some out in front achillea 'Summerwine' that I really saw what it could do - the dark raspberry eye of the coreopsis matched the achillea perfectly - and on closer inspection, I noted that the flowers on the achillea were paler at the centre, like the coreopsis in reverse. Not planned - but satisfying. Their habits were a good contrast - the achillea stands in a clump, while the coreopsis is more wispy, with thin stems and leaves but plenty of flowers. (Like coreopsis verticilliata, below.) Unfortunately, no picture, but here's the two items in question, see for yourself:

Coreopsis rosea 'Heaven's Gate'

Achillea 'Summerwine'

Indigo: Seventh Colour or Odd One Out?

Indigo is the odd colour out of the spectrum. It has no complement, and it is really only in there because of Isaac Newton. He may have applied strict mathematical logic to the question of the planets’ orbit and their cause, but he also imagined that while gravity whisked the planets around in their courses, they produced the music of the spheres. Humans cannot hear this music.

The seven planets, however, were thought to each have their own distinct note. Seven planets, seven notes in the Western major scale, so of course seven colours in the rainbow.  Newton even felt that there were similar intervals between colours and notes. (You can hear the tones and see their associated colours on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDwhQJfr53w.) 

Presumably indigo fitted in well between blue and purple, but most modern scientists who study light consider the spectrum to consist of six colours, the primaries and their complementary colours.

Indigo is a useful term, however, for those colours that hover between blue and purple, inky and somber as they are. Some have suggested, in fact, that indigo is the colour of blue ink. The colour of new Levi’s, indigo means jeans for most people. It balances across the purple line from magenta. If magenta is in-your-face Lady Gaga, indigo is like Lou Reed – unflamboyantly cool.
 

The Battle of Magenta

Everyone is familiar with Gertrude Jekyll’s dislike of magenta – “malignant magenta”, as she called it. Many other writers of her period were equally dismissive, such as Alice Morse Earle, who said that as she glanced back through her writing on the subject, she felt the word “made the black and white look cheap.” (Kellaway: 93-5).  

E. A. Bowles referred to certain geraniums as having, ”a pernicious habit of daunting that awful form of floral original sin, magenta, and rejoicing in its iniquity.” (Bowles: 98) Wilhelm Miller pulled no punches in The Garden , saying of discord: “One colour is responsible for nearly all the trouble, viz. magenta and the tones near it.” (Miller:156)

Geranium 'Patricia', photo by Simon Ross

This led to some controversy, as others, like the American writer Louise Beebe Wilder, argued in favour of “Magenta the Maligned”. Clarence Elliott, who owned the famous Six Hills Nursery in Stevenage, went further and criticized the avoidance of magenta, saying,” Some folk seem hardly to like to use the word “magenta," as though it were unclean, and resort instead to "rosy purple." This seems as bad as softening "cold bath" into “soapy tepid.” (Elliott: 603)

Impure Blue

There seems to be a reluctance to admit that there is such a colour as bluish-purple. Blue has rarity value, for sure, and I can believe that it sells better. But stop trying to convince us that Siberian irises, phlox, or geraniums are blue. 

Or dianthus, as one blog famously pointed out in an article entitled True Blue, My Ass. She was complaining there about dianthus amurensis “Siberian Blues”; maybe they’re depressed in Siberia because the best they can muster is a sort of washy magenta. Maybe the Siberians need filters. If you look up “Siberian Blues” on Google, the images will dazzle you with their blueness.  Some of them are so blue, they look fake even on first glance.

I had the same suspicions when I bought the phlox “Blue Paradise” to sit between the magenta and blue parts of a border. And I have to say it’s not too bad, really, but it’s not blue. Claire Austin’s page has a good picture of it: a purple flower, leaning towards blue-purple. 

Another much-hyped phlox, Nicky, apparently becomes blue-purple when the light is low, and magenta when it’s sunnier. A neat trick, but still not blue.

Another blog, Carolyn’s Shade Garden, provided the inspiration for this piece when she explained why she uses Latin names:

And my favorite:  Gardener: “I didn’t like the iris I bought last year, when it bloomed the flowers were purple.”  Me: “You are right the flowers are purple.”  Gardener: “Then why do you call it blue flag?”  I could write a whole different article on the color I call “horticultural blue”, which results from plant breeders’ apparent need to describe purple flowers as blue.

My own personal theory is there is paranoia about trying to sell anything as purple or purple-blue. Personally, I love these colours, but I seem to be in a minority. I’ve loved Siberian irises since I first saw them, and their colour is still gorgeous to me.

It would be fun to do a border or bed in Impure Blue. You would have lots of geraniums, asters, campanulas, clematis and irises to choose from. And hellebores. And roses. And....well, you get the idea. Now I have to think of similarly impure plants to go with them.