The stunning blue of the cornflower is so unique in nature that it has a colour name of its own.
Blue has always been my favourite colour, but it’s the unique shade of the cornflower that has always resonated with me. It was only in recent years that I finally grew these gorgeous flowers in my garden, at first with limited success, but this spring I nurtured an amazing display of them, standing over a metre tall, competing with foxgloves, lupins and delphiniums to show their glory.
Seen ‘en masse’, their bold blue blooms are perched atop tall and proud stems graced with furry ribbons of grey-green leaves, murmuring their secrets in the gentle breezes. Their ragged papery petals surround the inner florets that look like indigo soldiers capped with white tipped helmets, standing to attention as they wait patiently for bees to alight.
Whilst we all equate a soft, almost pastel, blue with the cornflower, in its prime it can be a rich velvet shade, reminiscent of the glow of the midnight sky on a full moon. It reminds me of the colour of the third eye, the energy centre of intuition, like the High Priestess in the Tarot, deep and mysterious, quietly present and powerful. However, like a chameleon, it changes its hue depending on the light, the point in its life cycle, and alkalinity of the soil.
On a cloudy day, or in the half-light of dawn or dusk, the blooms look like they are illuminated from within, as if the dimming of the light is a secret sign that it’s time to flourish and reveal their inner truth. In the bright sunshine, they are more likely to reflect the colour of the midday sky, a perfect and pure blue so rarely seen in nature. And as they fade after their prime, so too the petals become the most delicate shade of a pale sky, washed out at the end of a hot summer day. This looks much like the colour we all know and love as cornflower blue.
Nature is amazingly clever in the way it creates blue petals. Plant chemicals called flavonoids have a pigment that is soluble in water, and when this dissolves in water that is alkaline in the sacs inside the petals, they turn blue. If the water in the petals is acidic, they transform into shades of pink and red, just like litmus paper in all those science experiments we did at school. Where there are more alkaline elements in the soil that cornflowers are grown in, the more likely they are to be a deeper blue.
Bee’s absolutely love the cornflowers growing in our vegetable garden next to the apple and quince orchard. Blue flowers are known to be great for attracting bees to facilitate pollination because, unlike humans, these insects have receptors that enable them to see ultraviolet light on the colour spectrum. The flavonoid pigments responsible for making the petals blue are sensitive to ultraviolet light, so bee’s can easily see flowers of this colour. It makes working in the vegie garden such a pleasure when the cornflowers are in full bloom.
When it comes to choosing my favourite blue flower, it’s hard for me to decide whether cornflowers or blue delphiniums take the box seat. But that’s a story for another time!