Rose: Preserving Blooms and Buds

Spring Blues

Green - verdant, lush, and full of life - is of course the colour of spring. But there is another colour of spring which runs a close second - blue.

Look around the early spring garden or woods and blue can be found everywhere. No other colour is as abundant among spring’s herbaceous plants (except the acknowledged spring winner: green!).

Blue-flowering spring plants, including herbs, are common - periwinkle, bugleweed, bluebell, iris, forget-me-nots, lilacs, violets, spiderwort, heal-all. Nature saves most of the bold reds, yellows, oranges and purples for high summer and fall.

In the colour spectrum, blue falls between green and violet. Is this nature’s way of making the transition from winter evergreen - to spring green - to spring blue - to summer’s riot of colours?

The mechanisms of flower colour lie deep within the genetic make-up of the plant; but beyond that the forces of natural selection must have exerted their influence in order to make blue such a prominent spring colour. The blue colour must provide some adaptive benefit to the plants with blue flowers.

Does the blue attract insects more than other colours? Does the blue attract a specific insect which is more numerous in the spring, or only alive then? Is this insect vital to the pollination of the blue-flowering plant? What of other animals - foragers or birds for example? What effect, if any, does the blue colour have on them? Perhaps the blue repels certain foragers. Is the blue colour a result of soil minerals? Is there some quality of sunlight in spring that affects the soil, and so perhaps influences flower colour? Or does the light affect the flower colour directly? Maybe it is human eyesight that changes in the spring so that we discern blue and green more.

Perhaps, the answer involves all these and factors not yet thought of: remember Shakespeare’s line, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy!” Or, maybe Mother Nature and the Green Goddess just prefer blue in spring!

To solve the blue puzzle, one would need to be all of botanist, geneticist, mineralogist, entomologist, meteorologist, naturalist . . . soothsayer and seer.

If colours have personalities, blue has a certain poignant, romantic quality. Never known for being cheery, blue is generally sedate and aristocratic. Blue and green, singly or together, have a “cooling” effect. Isabella Valancy Crawford, a 19th century Canadian poet who should be better known, captured this coolness in these lines from “Said the West Wind”:

The broad, bold Sun . . . blots a drop
Of pollen-gilded dew from violet cup
Set bluely in the mosses of the wood.

Whether “bluely” or not, there is no doubt that spring flowers stud spring’s exuberant welcome mat of new growth.

By Jen L. Jones