First of all, violets are not blue. Violets are violet. That’s why they’re called violets.
But this perception problem is by no means limited to members of the Violaceae plant family. Plant fanciers in general seem to have problems with the whole color spectrum thing.
I know this because blue is my favorite color. Therefore, I am always on the lookout for blue flowers. You’d think this would be easy, right? Oh, no.
I once wrote to a flower expert, asking where I could find any honest-to-God blue blue flowers. She sent me a list of blue varieties. Guess what color most of them turned out to be?
And of course, even when the picture in the catalogue is really blue, the seeds are as atp to come up purple as not. There’s no escaping the pernicious purpleness.
Yeah, I know, blue and purple come from the same pigment, delphinidin. But if they can come up purple flowers that never approach blueness, why the heck can’t they do it the other way around?!
I wheedled my mom into getting some blue irises. I told her to make it clear to the gardener guy that she was looking for blue, not purple. She bought her bulbs, and I eagerly awaited the beautious blooms. Spring sprung, and a cluster of purple irises popped up.
Blue is extremely rare in the flower world. EXTREMELY rare. This makes it something of a holy grail for flower breeders. Thus, whenever they get a new variety that’s a hair closer to blue on the spectrum, they trumpet its “blueness.” In reality, unless you’re talking about a gentian, delphinium, or meconopsis (and a tiny scattering of other exceptions, like this bizarrely blue Salvia), “blue” actually means “slightly more violet than magenta.”
(See also “white” for Hemerocallis breeders, “red” for irises, and “black” for just about any plant.)
ETA: Oh and, yes, the cheaper catalogs will often falsely emphasize the blue in their pictures with photoshop. Please refuse to give these liars any business.
Why is that? It can’t be that it’s too close to green to stand out, because yellow is also close to green, and there are plenty of yellow flowers. And it can’t be because it’s a cool color (see glut of purple, above). Is it that it’s similar to green and a cool color?
Also, if I have a thread that’s part MPSIMSy, part Pit-ish, and has a GQ-type question side topic, where do I put it?
My theory, which I have made up, and have nothing to back it with, is something about how most of the blue pigments in paints and dyes are highly toxic. I assume the same is true in the pigments of nature.
Lobelia comes in some pretty good shades of blue. I understand from an American mate that they are not a common garden flower in the US which I found surprising as they are a staple in the British garden.
From the language side of the issue, not biology, they are blue. Or rather, they were. English has been periodically adding color words for centuries. Orange, for example, has always existed, but in Old English there was no specific word for it. They could describe it, presumably by saying “yellowish red” or something, and they could no doubt recognize it, but it would have been a subset of either red or yellow. Purple is a Latin borrowing (albeit a very old one), and violet a medieval borrowing. So before we had specific vocabulary for that color, my guess is that it would have fallen under the “blue” range. So think of “violets are blue” as a delightfully archaic sense of the word “blue” rather than flat-out wrong.
Lobelia prefer cool summers, which aren’t common in most parts of the US. You can grow them in warm summer areas, but they can get ratty looking after a while.
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