Colours: Red, Blue or Purple?

Purple Clematis Flower.  Nikon D7000

6th June 2012

With all the red, white and blue of the Jubilee going on over the last week, I thought I would 'officially' consider a theme of colours (despite posts on yellow and another purple previously) to go with textures and smells. Any one commenting with "what's soft brown and smells of ..." will be in trouble.

I thought I would start with a colour that is a bit of a conundrum; Purple.

We know that you can make purple by mixing red and blue paint, but these are at opposite ends of the spectrum and so about as far apart as the eye can perceive, yet when mixed, we see one colour.  Often though, when we consider a rainbow, we know it starts with red but then goes 'blue, indigo, violet'; I have heard folks refer to the violet end as purple, yet it is really about as blue as we can see.

The clematis flower is interesting, in some light and from some angles it looks quite red, from other angles it can look quite blue.  Some may say 'it is magenta', others may contend it is too red to be a real purple.   However you like your purple, at least it is not generally a colour to worry about treading on.