{"id":19999,"date":"2014-11-13T00:18:36","date_gmt":"2014-11-13T08:18:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=19999"},"modified":"2014-11-13T00:18:36","modified_gmt":"2014-11-13T08:18:36","slug":"a-patch-of-fireweed-in-the-northwest-what-color-are-those-blossoms-do-i-need-to-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/a-patch-of-fireweed-in-the-northwest-what-color-are-those-blossoms-do-i-need-to-know\/","title":{"rendered":"A Patch of Fireweed in the Northwest — What Color Are Those Blossoms? Do I Need to Know?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Fireweed<\/a>
Fireweed blossom glowing magenta to pink in the full summer sun. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By Barbara Falconer Newhall<\/em><\/p>\n

I couldn’t make up my mind about that tall stand of fireweed I saw growing on the edge of a woodlet in the Pacific Northwest last summer. Were those blossoms purple? Blue? Pink? Or what? I needed to know.<\/p>\n

I took photos, lots of them, and, sure enough, when I pulled the captured images up on my monitor back home, I still couldn’t tell what color they were. Their hue had changed day by day and minute by minute during my visit to their home in the\u00a0woods, and they were doing the
\n<\/p>\n

\"Fireweed<\/a>
When the sun dropped low over the San Juan Islands and put this stalk of fireweed blossoms in the shade, they turned purple, violet and lavender. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

same on my computer screen.\u00a0I Googled\u00a0myself over to Wikipedia to see where the colors fit on the color wheel. But no sooner had I spotted\u00a0some\u00a0promising color charts — including Goethe\u2019s eighteenth-century color wheel\u00a0— than I realized\u00a0it was time to meet an old friend for lunch.<\/p>\n

As I dug into\u00a0my feta and spinach phyllo over at La Mediterranee in Berkeley, my friend, a Buddhist, turned the conversation to\u00a0the Western mind\u2019s tendency to judge, make distinctions, and assign things to categories, including colors.\u00a0Our brains get so busy putting things in their place\u2014naming them\u2014she said, we forget to . . .<\/p>\n

Forget to what? I can\u2019t remember. What was it my friend wanted me to know? Something about being open to what’s real, to what’s right in front of you, except she said it way better than that.<\/p>\n

My lunchmate was making a lot of sense. But as I moved my fork from the piquant feta and spinach on my plate to the cinnamony chicken cilicia,\u00a0my thoughts strayed\u00a0to\u00a0my plans for<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
The backside of a blossom: magenta pink with violet shadows and a splash of crimson at the base of the petals. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

the afternoon. As soon as I got home, I promised myself, I’d reboot my computer, pull up my fireweed photos, and get the exact names of their hues from the experts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Naming things has a long and venerable history in Western culture. God himself invited\u00a0Adam to name the birds of the sky as well as all\u00a0the animals, wild and domestic.<\/p>\n

Lunch over, back\u00a0home, I set my inner Westerner free. A few clicks of the mouse, and there they were, stunning\u00a0colors to choose from: cornflower blue, heliotrope,\u00a0violet, mauve, magenta pink, crimson, lavender \u2014 words as evocative\u00a0as their subjects.<\/p>\n

I’m pretty sure that my Buddhist\u00a0friend, Westerner born and bred that she is, would like them as much as I do.<\/p>\n

More Pacific Northwest flora at “San Juan Islands Flora: Or, I Cling, Therefore I Am.”<\/a>\u00a0 If you like art, you might like “Judy Seidel: Click Here for an Eyeful of Her Life-Affirming Paintings.”<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A weedy stand of\u00a0 fireweed grows six feet tall at the edge of a San Juan Islands woods. True to its name, fireweed grows in woodsy places disturbed by fire. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Stalks
The same patch of fireweed in November — silvery white.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

I couldn’t make up my mind about that tall stand of fireweed I saw growing on the edge of a woodlet in the Pacific Northwest last summer. Were those blossoms purple? Blue? Pink? Or what? Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20007,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[272,34,1351,88,31,91,1349,972],"class_list":["post-19999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-my-rocky-spiritual-journey","tag-buddhism","tag-dont-miss","tag-fireweed","tag-nature","tag-photo-ops","tag-religion-and-spirituality","tag-san-juan-islands","tag-wildflowers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19999\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}