potential flower colors question
totototo@telus.net (Sat, 20 Dec 2008 12:05:54 PST)
Many flower colors are due to the presence of more than one pigment. Our local
large camas, /Camassia leichtlinii ssp. suksdorfii/, clearly has a deep blue
pigment with lesser amounts of a rather muddy purplish pigment. The combination
in the usual flower gives the deep saturated blue-purple characteristic of this
subspecies (and also of /Camassia quamash/).
Years of scouting around for color variants have yielded a number of white,
near-white, sky-blues, and so on. Once, just once, I thought I saw a pink
flowered form, but as the sun was low, this may have been due to the reddish
evening light.
Oddly enough, the type of this species occurs only around Roseburg, Oregon, and
is a pale creamy yellow.
Luther Burbank at one time was working with /Camassia/. The multi-volume
"Harvest of the Years" has a colored illustration of his trial patch, but the
color is not photographic, so it's hard to say if he actually had the range of
colors depicted.
/Cichorium intybus/, a common roadside weed that lines our highways with
skyblue in late summer and early fall, seems to have the same combination of
pigments, but its blue is much less saturated. A good white flowered form
turned up once, I've seen the odd pink once or twice, and I've also seen plants
with a deeper blue.
At the other end of the spectrum, consider /Tulipa sprengeri/, which has a
uniquely glowing red flower. I'm convinced that this is a red pigment plus a
yellow pigment, and keep hoping for a yellow-flowered specimen to turn up among
the many self-sown seedlings in my garden. So far no luck.
--
Rodger Whitlock
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Maritime Zone 8, a cool Mediterranean climate
on beautiful Vancouver Island