LOVE FOR THREEE ORANGES

Van Gogh’s Child with Orange.

Fantin Latour’s Nasturtiums

A Candy daylily on the wane.

Asclepias tuberosa, butterfly weed is one of the joys of July.

Prince Truffaldino does not visit my garden in search of oranges, as he does in Prokofiev’s Любовь к трём апельсинам opera. Just as well. Neither butterfly weed, day lilies blossoms nor nasturtium blossoms secrete the princesses Fata Morgana’s spell compelled him to seek. They are orange all right, but they serve a purpose other than providing a mate for ill behaved princes. Aptly named butterfly weed’s function is to feed the larvae of Monarch butterflies. Day lilies and nasturtium blossoms must be shared with humans who add them to salads and fritattas.

Gardeners are known to fall in love with certain colors, as painters occasionally do. At the moment, I happen to be in love with orange. ”Everyone knows that yellow, orange, and red suggest ideas of joy and plenty. I can paint you the skin of Venus with mud, provided you let me surround it as I will,” said Eugene Delacroix. Van Gogh relied on the blue color to provide chromatic balance in paintings lavished with his beloved oranges and yellows. Oranges and yellows and blues are the colors of the Midi, of the Indienne textiles of Provence, of lavender fields dotted with poppies. I think they may also be the colors of paradise.