Colors II

Colors II

      If flowers were black and white while grass stayed green, gardeners would spend their time clipping the blades of putting surfaces. Luckily, flowers look better.

      I often point out a bed to my visitors: “That's the Red Hill!” This raised bed is about 4” above my flat property. Varieties of red azaleas fill the space. Some lighter, some darker, some with a slight purplish cast. But red.

      Purple flowers are elsewhere, as are whites. The job of the latter is to keep clashing colors apart.

The light red blooms I call “pink”. The light purple ones I call “light purple”. A simple set of other colors completes my vocabulary.

Some colors I can identify from my garden yesterday: red, white, purple, pink.  That's enough.

      However, I've discovered a list of named colors on Wikipedia that goes a full spectrum beyond my personal list.

      So that we may all inflate our vocabulary, I am presenting to the gardeners of the world colors that will bring our descriptions to raging life. The late color expert Don Voss used the RHS color charts when he was registering hybrids but I don't think he ever chose any of the below.

     The list of names will not have any “translation” next to them. Sharpen your pencils and note the color that you think is close to the given ones. After this list will be my approximation of each.

1) Alien Armpit 2) Anti-flash White 3) Arsenic 4) Big Foot Feet 5) Booger Buster 6) Brown Nose 7) Caput Mortuum 8) Cool Black 9) Coquelicot 10) Dark Liver 11) Deep Koamau 12) Ecru 13) Feldgrau 14) Fuzzy Wuzzy

15) Hooker's Green 16) Mummy's Tomb 17) Ogre Odor 18) Sasquatch Socks 19) Zomp

      OK, put your pencils down and let's see how you did. The colors below are my vocabulary-limited opinion of the above:

1) Green 2) White 3) Black 4) Brown 5) Yellow 6) Brown 7) Brown 8) Blue 9) Red 10) Gray

11. Blue 12) Tan 13) Green 14) I have no idea 15) Green 16) Gray 17) Red 18) Purple 19) Green

      These colors are DRM free, lonely, lovable, desperate for a home and immediately available to any nursery whose previous advertising was written by the girl who comes in on Tuesdays.

      If you wish to have more precise definitions, including RGB values, begin at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colors:_A-F

      And for those of you who have followed my earlier essays: I still like red, though I'm looking for Big Foot Feet flowers that fit into a bed of Sasquatch Socks and have an Ogre Odor!