I love the transitory times of day, the brief moments when night turns to day and day returns to night. They have nice names, dawn and dusk. I like it that both are just one syllable and start with a D. Dawn comes from the Anglo Saxon word dagian, to become day. Dusk comes from the Middle English word deosc, meaning darkening or chilly. And then there is twilight, which comes from the Anglo Saxon twi meaning double or doubtful and leoht, light. I love to be out at dusk and dawn. I love to watch the sun rise and set. I love to linger in the twilight when the light becomes doubtful as it fades away. Winter twilights, when the sky is clear, are especially beautiful. The last color before the sky slides to black is one of my favorite colors, a pure deep blue. I’ve tried to capture that twilight color with my camera, but it never looks right. The closest representation of it I know of are the evening paintings by Maxfield Parrish. We get skies like that now and then in the winter.
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| Hill Top Farm |
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| Dusk |
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| At Close of Day |
To name that twilight shade of blue is not easy. I’ve tried my hand at painting and I know a little something about pigments. I’d say it is something between cerulean and ultramarine. Those pigments have interesting derivations. Cerulean comes from the Latin word caeruleus, meaning dark blue or blue-green, which in turn came from caelum, which means heaven. The word celestial comes from the same Latin root. The pigment cerulean is made mostly from cobalt. Ultramarine is a glorious color. The name comes from the Latin ultramarinus, "beyond the sea", because the pigment was imported into Europe from mines in Afghanistan by Italian traders during the 14th and 15th centuries. It was made from the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli, which made it the most expensive paint color until a synthetic version was invented in 1826. In the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance, if you wanted to flout how rich you were, you commissioned paintings with lots of ultramarine in them. One of my favorite examples of this is the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, a gorgeous illuminated manuscript from the 15th Century.
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| A page from Très Riches Heures. |
I love the color blue. After green, I’d say it is my second favorite color (for today at least – ask me again when the poppies are in bloom and my answer might be red). In nature, there are lots of inorganic things that are colored blue, minerals and gemstones such as sapphire, aquamarine, turquoise, tanzanite, and diamond (the Hope Diamond is a blue diamond).
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| Sapphire, aquamarine, turquoise, lapis lazuli, tanzanite, the Hope Diamond. |
But blue is not a common color among living things. In fact, when blue does appear in plants and animals, it's for reasons other than pigment. In animals, the blue color is due to the way the surface molecules reflect light. For example, the famous blue morpho butterfly (Morpho peleides), gets its color because its wing scales are aligned in ridges that make light bend at just the right wavelength so that what we see is luminous blue.
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| Blue Morpho Butterfly. |
Birds with blue feathers get their color through a similar process. The surface of their blue feathers is made up of microscopic beads spaced in a way that they scatter light so that everything except blue light is cancelled out. Blue on any animal (including a human’s blue eyes) is due to some kind of light reflection rather than pigmentation. The only exception is the obrina olivewing butterfly (Nessaea obrinus), which is the only known animal in nature that produces blue pigment.
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| Blue Jay. |
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| Obrina Olivewing Butterfly. |
The same is true in the plant world, where blue pigment also doesn't really exist. Flowers that appear blue are using a mixture of pigments, combined with the reflection of light, to generate the appearance of blue. I love blue flowers and try to grow some in my garden every year. I grow love-in-a-mist (Nigella), forget-me-nots (Myosotis), borage (Borago officinalis) cornflowers (Centaurea cyanus), grape hyacinths (Muscari), morning glories (Ipomoea), delphiniums (Delphinium), and firmament (Cynoglossum amabile). There are others I’ve tried to grow without success – hydrangeas (too cold here), Himalayan poppies (too fussy) and plants in the gentian family (also too fussy).
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| Forget-me-not, borage, morning glory, muscari. |
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| Himalayan poppy, hydrangea, bottle gentian, delphinium. |
I don’t know why “feeling blue” came to mean being sad or melancholy. I did a bit of research, but no one seems to have a definitive answer. Most think it might be because it is associated with rainy and gloomy weather, but to me, gloomy weather is more gray than anything else. Anyway, I don’t associate blue with sadness. It is too lovely a color for that.
The science of light is fascinating to me. Objects appear blue to us because when light hits them, they absorb the other colors and reflect the blue light. Light at the blue end of the visible spectrum has shorter wave lengths and higher energy. Science has shown that exposure to blue light is essential for good health. High-energy visible light boosts our alertness, helps our memory, and elevates our mood. In fact, something called light therapy is used to treat Seasonal Affective Disorder – a type of depression that some people experience during the dark days of winter. The lights used in this therapy emit bright white light that contains a significant amount of blue light rays. So it’s kind of funny that we say we’re feeling blue when we’re sad or depressed. Also, blue light is very important in regulating our Circadian Rhythm – our body's waking/sleeping cycle. Exposure to blue light during daytime hours helps maintain a healthful Circadian Rhythm. But too much blue light late at night from a tablet, computer, or e-reader, or cell phone can disrupt the cycle, causing sleepless nights and daytime fatigue. Enough science. I’ll just say that there is another shade of blue I’m looking forward to seeing soon, the warm, blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
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| After the weekend storm. |
I had an amazing midwinter surprise last week – a gift certificate from someone that allowed me to buy trees and blueberry bushes. I was flabbergasted by it. My yearly garden expenditures are usually limited to what my wife will allow me to have from our tax return. Over the years as our children have grown up, that tax return has gotten smaller and smaller and so have my garden purchases. But then, as the number of people in the house has dwindled and as I’ve grown older, the size of my garden has decreased too, so it has worked out. This year was different. With the removal of thirty pine trees last year, the task of replanting the woodland garden and planting a blueberry hedge was going to take up most of my garden allowance. To adjust for that, I had trimmed all other garden plans to a minimum. This generous and very thoughtful gift changed that. The trees and blueberry bushes have been ordered and will arrive sometime in early April. Now when the tax return comes and I’m given my allowance, I’ll be able to expand my plans. It looks like the garden of 2020 is going to be great.
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| Looking at the house from the barn door. |
After a few days of thaw, winter reasserted itself. We had a two hour delay on Thursday and school was canceled on Friday. The storm that blew in dumped about eight inches of snow on us. The plows were hard-pressed to keep the road clear. Stacey did not go to work on Friday. She hates to drive in the snow. Miriam left on Thursday before the worst snow began. She drove down to spend a week with the Thayns. Before the snow buried everything again, I found snowdrops in bud in the front flowerbed. I was happy to see them. It’s nice to know they are still there, waiting under the snow.
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| Snowdrops! |
