Christina here and today I’m going to talk about all things yellow because I seem to be surrounded by this colour at the moment! To me, it signifies spring, sunshine and Easter, among other things. And it’s a colour I’ve always associated with happiness – just looking at it makes you want to smile because it’s bright and beautiful!
Now that the clocks have changed, and with spring finally having arrived here in the northern hemisphere, we can enjoy a lot more sunshine and the world feels like a brighter place. Although I’ve never been affected by SAD, and actually love the darker months of the year, it’s still great when you can go outside and feel the sunlight on your face. It’s not surprising that the sun was so important to our ancestors, and that some of them saw it as a deity. We may not literally worship it these days, but we certainly appreciate its appearance for longer each day.
The best thing about spring for me are the flowers, and the majority of them seem to be yellow. This colour reflects the light really well so that the blooms stand out against the greenery. There aren’t that many insects at this time of year, but they are needed for help with pollination. Being yellow helps the flowers to attract them, so that makes sense.
I like how the spring flowers appear in a particular order every year – it’s as if they’ve decided to take turns, one after the other so we won’t be without at any time. They all seem to have slightly different shades of yellow too. Crocus, which tend to be the first to come out in our garden, have that deep saffron colour that indicates the lovely spice and dye that can be obtained from the type Crocus Sativus (although not our common garden variety unfortunately). The saffron-yielding ones can be grown in the UK, but you only get about 1 gram of saffron from 150 flowers, so I don’t think that’s for me!
Next comes my favourite, the primrose – I adore both the flowers and the colour. They are apparently an important source of nectar for butterflies, but for me they are like little splashes of sunshine on the ground. I’ve made sure there are lots in my garden! Almost at the same time the cowslips emerge – a relative of the primrose and with nearly the same delicate colour. Before moving to the UK, I had actually never seen primroses as we only had cowslips in Sweden for some reason. But they are both gorgeous.
At the moment, our garden – and indeed every garden and roadside in this part of the UK – is covered in a carpet of daffodils (and other narcissi). It’s the national flower of Wales and I can totally understand why they’d choose it as it’s beautiful. Their cheerful colour lights up the landscape. Daffodils were not native to the UK but were brought here by the Romans, who apparently believed that the sap from these flowers had healing powers, according to Google. (Do flowers have sap?)
Whenever I see them, I can’t help but think of William Wordsworth’s beautiful poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, beginning with
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
(The rest of the poem can be found here). That is exactly what I see when I wander round outside at the moment. No wonder it made him wax lyrical!
Right now the Forsythia is starting to flower too, brightening up the hedges and gardens around here, and I have two of these bushes. (It’s apparently named after a Scottish botanist called William Forsyth (1737-1804) who was a royal head gardener.) And there’s a yellow broom that will soon start as well.
Tulips follow soon after, and although I prefer the red ones, the deep yellow ones are gorgeous too. As you probably know, tulips first came to England in the 1630s, when a sort of “tulipmania” swept the nation (and indeed much of Europe). It must have been a beautiful sight for those who had never seen them before!
There is one type of yellow flowering plant that is missing from my garden, however, and that is a mimosa tree. When I lived in London, I used to walk past one in a nearby garden square and you could smell its divine scent for almost a whole block. It was slightly over-powering, but still gorgeous. I really must find one and hope it will thrive here, although it’s not particularly suited to colder climes.
There are so many evocative names of the different shades of yellow. Who can fail to like colours called canary, lemon, citrine, primrose, sunflower, jonquil or butterscotch? I’m less keen on mustard and ochre, but I particularly like jonquil (from the French for daffodil – jonquille), one of those instances where the English language has both a French and an Old English word for the same thing. I first came across this particular shade in one of Georgette Heyer’s novels, where the heroine wore a jonquil yellow gown. It sounded lovely and much nicer than the insipid white the debutantes always seemed to have to wear!
I wondered about the etymology of the word ‘yellow’ and found that it comes from the Old English geolu, which makes sense to me as it was gulr in Old Norse and is still gul in modern Swedish.
Although the word yellow symbolises happiness, warmth and sunshine in most cultures, it can of course also have negative connotations – cowardice and deceit, being ‘chicken’ or calling someone ‘yellow-bellied’ (a bit old-fashioned). But to me, it’s an overwhelmingly positive colour so I prefer not to think about that.
A few other strange facts about yellow that may or may not be true:-
- Apparently it’s seen as a childish colour by men (male readers, do you agree?) and should therefore be avoided when marketing products to men.
- If you have too much yellow in a baby’s room, they cry more. (I would totally disagree with that as both my girls had primrose yellow bedrooms as babies and it didn’t make any difference as to whether they cried or not).
- Too much yellow can make you lose focus.
- Too little causes insecurity and low self-esteem.
- Yellow gemstones help you make decisions.
- It means different things in different cultures – in Japan it means courage, in India it stands for knowledge and learning.
- It was tradition for women to wear yellow ribbons when they waited for their men to come back from war.
- Yellow flowers are a symbol of friendship.
Now Easter is almost here and this season is filled with yellow – eggs, chicks and flowers – and I shall continue to enjoy it. I hope you do too!
Do you like the colour yellow and, if so, which is your favourite shade? Or do you have a favourite spring flower, one that makes you feel like winter is definitely over?