Even a simple scientific definition of colour sounds complicated: objects absorb different wavelengths of light and our eyes receive the reflected light from that object and the brain processes those signals – so we perceive colour. Instruments have been created that can precisely measure and define a particular colour, which is important for photography and printing.

Humans are not calibrated machines and so different people perceive the same colour differently. An extreme example of this is colour blindness, the inability to distinguish particular shades of colour, most commonly red and green but also blue and yellow. With red-green colour blindness it would be difficult to pick out red blooms or tell ripe red tomatoes from unripe ones.



Examples of the Ishihara Test for colour blindness

The perception of colours also changes due to the intensity and quality of light: in low light the colour red fades first, with blue green being the strongest colour perceived. The time of day and weather also affect perception of colour: daylight on an overcast day is bluer than in orange sunset.

It can be difficult to know what exactly you will be getting when ordering a plant based on an image in a catalogue or a website. Not only is there natural variation, particularly if plants are raised from seed and not cuttings, the plant may be wrongly named; cameras do not always capture colour with good fidelity so the original photograph may be poor or be badly edited; colour matching in the printing process in a catalogue maybe awry, or your computer or smartphone screen may not accurately portray colours. There is also optimistic and inaccurate plant naming to contend with, particularly around the colour blue where tweaking of catalogue images enhances the blueness or depth of colour in a bloom to make it more attractive, desirable and expensive. Below is an extreme example of an edited image from an advert for rose seeds on Ebay. (Not that you would grow a rose from seed because it would be unlikely to match its parent).The image in the middle is clearly a mirror image and colour edit of the dark red rose, which itself is an image of the fictitious black dragon rose, a colour edit of a real pink rose with red stripes. On the right is a new rose I have ‘bred’ by fiddling with the colours of the blue rose in photoshop for five minutes.



Fake coloured roses

So what do gardeners and landscape designers do? cHere you are working with splashes of colour on petals rather than solid colour, with different size, shape and density of the blooms and foliage.



The Colour Wheel

The beds and borders of the famous gardens can show great skill in understanding and designing with colour – using knowledge of the exact height, shape and flowering times of plants. It makes me think that if I spent more time researching these factors and had more experience experimenting then I could probably produce more reliable flowering combinations. But I also enjoy what results from the vagaries of nature, the need to fill a gap of bare soil with what is at hand or the bonus of an unexpected seedling such as a bright yellow Welsh poppy in a carefully chosen selection of muted colours. Inspiration can be taken from a great garden, a patch of flowers round the corner, from an alpine meadow or roadside verge but it may prove tantalisingly difficult to reproduce.

References:
https://www.colourblindawareness.org/colour-blindness/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishihara_test
https://www.colormatters.com/color-and-design/basic-color-theory

Tags: Colour, Combining colour, Blue flowers