Gardening with Margaret Matthews
Lavender’s blue — or is it?
by Margaret Matthews
Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly, Lavender’s green… (Old English Rhyme)
Lavender’s blue. No it’s not! It’s lavender.
Lavender’s green. Yes, the leaves of the lavender plant are green…or are they grey? We could have a long debate about the colour of the flowers and leaves of the lavender plant, all brought about by this rhyme. Was the originator of the rhyme stating a fact or was he trying to win an argument? Perhaps in modern parlance the words ‘dilly dilly’ could be translated as ‘Lavender’s blue, you dill’!
There is no doubt that the word ‘blue’ is widely and often inaccurately used to describe flowers that are not ‘true blue’. These include jacaranda, agapanthus, wisteria and even the English bluebell. If you compare any of these with a blue cornflower or forget-me-not, you will see what I mean.
There is a charming myth concerning Mary, mother of Jesus. It is said that she spread her blue veil to dry over a bush of rosemary which had white flowers and next morning the flowers had turned blue. Now, unless the flowers have changed again the past two thousand years, they are not blue; they are lavender.
The novel that won Vision Australia’s Audio Book of the Year Award for 2001 was ‘Conditions of Faith’ by Alex Miller. His female character, Emily, is presented with a bunch of "pink and blue snapdragons". If the author really could produce a truly blue snapdragon (antirrhinum) he might earn more from this than from his writing.
Some flowers that can truly be called blue, apart from forget-me-nots and cornflowers, are plumbago, convolvulus, delphinium, larkspur, love-in-a-mist, the temperamental blue poppy mecanopsis (the only blue member of the poppy family), the lovely Western Australian leschenaultia, and oxypetalum (tweedia). Hydrangeas can be blue if the soil is sufficiently acid.
Perhaps because blue is a relatively rare colour in the plant world, it is, like all things rare, keenly sought after. But why not call a spade a spade? Why not recognise lavender as a colour instead of claiming it is blue? Sometimes I think we go too far in our efforts to improve on nature. Why can’t we be content with the colours that occur in a particular species?
There are some families of flowers which have no blue species. There are no blue chrysanthemums, lilies, rhododendrons, camellias, azaleas, carnations, dianthus or gladioli. Perhaps not many will agree with me, but do we really need a blue rose? There are roses that are called blue, but one needs to have a good imagination to concede this. It is another case, not of ‘lavender’s blue’ but blue is lavender.
I had some good news this morning. I phoned the Herbarium and the Victorian Rose Society and was reassured by the latter that the research for a blue rose has been "put on hold, and it is unlikely that it will ever succeed". This is music to my ears! Also both the representatives of these organisations agreed with me that they, too, would prefer that the spectrum of colour which nature has ordained for the Queen of Flowers does not need any addition.
Some years ago when the debate on the blue rose began, I vented my feelings by writing a variation on the well-known poem, ‘I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree’.
Blue Genes
I hope that I shall never see
A blue rose in a rosary.
A rose with ancestry suspect,
Whose lineage is not direct,
A rose that looks as if its genes
Were fiddled with behind the scenes.
Rose bushes every summer wear
A host of lovely hues. They bear
Blossoms of red and white and pink,
Golden and yellow. You would think
That nature’s bounty would suffice
But no, "a blue rose would be nice"!
Science may change them, I suppose,
But man can never make a rose.
It is 12 years since I wrote this poem, and I am afraid that the last line may no longer be true. If you discover that the worst has happened, don’t bother to write…
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