Blue is the colour

    In The Morville Hours: The Story of a Garden (in which there are so many wonderful, quotable passages, and I recommend it highly) Katherine Swift describes blue as "the colour of possibility", and anyone who has ever gazed at a clear blue sky or an expanse of deep blue sea will understand what she means.

                         

      She comes up with wonderful words for the many shades of blue: looking at her garden in August, she says "I try to lift my spirits with blue late-summer flowers: Cupid's dart, monkshood, the cool blue fireworks of Agapanthus exploding like sherbet on the tongue.....I breathe in their colours, counting off the shades - navy-blue, purple-blue, sky-blue, pale blue, rehearsing other names from Sir Thomas's Garden Book: 'grideline'. from 'gris-de-lin, flax-grey, with tints of lilac; 'bertino', blue-grey; 'murrey', mulberry colour; 'watchet', sky-blue, the colour of childhood holidays by the sea."

 

   

     How has such a beautiful colour - and one associated with inspiration and spirituality, and as Katherine Swift says, possibility - given its name to a state of melancholy?

    (The pictures, by the way, are all of things in my house - which isn't completely blue, despite the impression given!)

Comments

[Peter the Flautist]

Ah, but why is the sky blue and the sea blue (I mean underwater rather than just by reflection of a blue sky) and why is gemstone sapphire blue but pure sapphire (such as my watch "glass") colourless? Simple questions of a 3 year old child, but surprisingly complex answers.

Dark Puss

[Barbara MacLeod]

Years ago I had a friend who was a potter. He used to make rather large ashtrays in which he would place pieces of glass which, when fired, gave a glass (?glazed) bottom. He said he always had trouble getting blue glass, e.g. Milk of Magnesia bottles, so when we walked along the seashore, would we mind collecting any pieces we found. To this day, though he is long dead, I still look for, and enjoy, blue glass. For example, on our sideboard sits a bottle of Harvey's Bristol Cream sherry - blue-ming beautiful it is!

[Vanessa]

Oooh - what's the paint colour in the third picture down? It's just what I'm looking for...