Blue
Blue
Blue is a color.
Blue is a mood.
Blue flowers are calming.
Being blue is being sad.
Blue flowers are rare.
Blue is the most difficult color to perceive.
Our eyes are great at distinguishing shades of green.
Poor at seeing blues.
We confuse blue with the colors nearest to it:
Purple and green.
"Blue is the hardest color to see.
More light energy is required for a full response from the blue-violet cones in the human eye, compared to green or red.
This is why it can be tricky to tell if something is black or navy."
The first use of the word "blue" was not until the mid-thirteenth century.
The seas in the "Odyssey" (written in the eighth century BCE) are not blue
But "wine red."
Few "primitive" cultures have a word for blue. Or so I learned.
"Languages from several ancient cultures did have words for the color blue.
Ancient Chinese used 'Qīng' as the traditional designation of both blue and green."
"Ancient Egyptian used the word 'wadjet' to describe a range of hues including blue, blue-green, and green."
Blue, purple, green.
Soothing colors.
Blue is the rarest flower color.
Less than 10% of flowers are blue.
Delphinums, plumbago, bluebells, hydrangeas, dayflowers, morning glories, cornflowers, forget-me-nots, some agapanthus.
Horticulturists are working on it though.
Here's the word from
David Lee
author of "Nature's Palette: The Science of Plant Color"
and a retired professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Florida International University in Miami.
"Less than 10 percent of the 280,000 species of flowering plants produce blue flowers," he said. "Blue is a color that is infrequent in nature."
The article, from treehugger goes on:
Why Aren't There More Blue Flowers?
"But for the first time, a group of scientists say they have genetically engineered a flower — a chrysanthemum — to produce a blue hue.
"'Chrysanthemums, roses, carnations and lilies are major floricultural plants, [but] they do not have blue flower cultivars,' Naonobu Noda, lead study author and scientist at Japan's National Agriculture and Food Research Organisation, told Gizmodo. 'No one has been able to generate blue flower cultivar by general breeding technique.'
"The researchers used genes from two other blue-flower-producing plants, butterfly peas and Canterbury bells, and mixed those genes with chrysanthemums. The resultant color was the work of 'co-pigmentation,' an intra-flower chemical interaction.
"'There is no true blue pigment in plants, so plants don't have a direct way of making a blue color,' Lee said. 'Blue is even more rare in foliage than it is in flowers.
Only a handful of understory tropical plants have truly blue foliage.'
"The key ingredients for making blue flowers are the red anthocyanin pigments.
"'Plants tweak, or modify, the red anthocyanin pigments to make blue flowers.
They do this through a variety of modifications involving pH shifts and mixing of pigments, molecules and ions.'
"In fact, the Japanese scientists who created the blue chrysanthemum say they did so via a 'two-step modification of the anthocyanin structure.'
"'Insects and birds can widely detect blue as a wavelength,' Lee said.
"Many of our favorite garden and cut flowers, such as roses, tulips and snapdragons, do not produce blue flowers.
"Chemists have been able to use delphinidin, the pigment that makes delphiniums and violas blue, to make a purple rose, but they still haven't been able to make a truly blue one. The same is true with carnations.
< "Blue did not develop as a common color during the process of natural selection." >
Lee has a presentation he gives to garden clubs that he has titled
"The difficulty of being blue."
"I like to end those talks with a reference to Kermit the Frog's song on 'Sesame Street' in which Kermit sings that 'it's not that easy being green'.
"It's even harder to be blue."
So, don't be blue.
Let blue ease you.
Look up.
Fall into the blue sky.
Let blue expand your heart.
Let blue give freedom to your voice.
Welcome blue
With a smile.
It is in beauty.
Beautiful blue.
It is a giveaway dance.
Breathing in blue.
All hearts beating as one with the heartbeat of the earth.
Surrounded with green blessings.
Where is the blue hiding?
Gratitude for blue.
Here is my joyous ode to blue, for you.
