What do you call this colour?

I know it’s called a blue bell, but is that colour really blue?

I know when you see a swathe of bluebells it appears as an almost purpley, bluey colour, and incidently the smell is heavenly, but what colour is the flower really?

I guess it doesn’t really matter what name we give it’s colour, it is intrinsically, and of itself a blue bell and all that conjures up in the collective psyche of us all, town or rural dweller.

When I lived abroad, on the shores of the Mediterranean, I used to have such a nostalgia for May and the bluebells, despite the fact that I had lived in the middle of cities in England for 20 years where, in the main,the only blue bells you saw, weren’t actually blue at all, but that pale mauve colour of the impostor, the Spanish bluebell.

There you go, I’m getting all nationalistic in defence of our indigenous blue bell, when I wouldn’t dream about harbouring the same sentiments about anything else.

The bluebell, somehow is really special to us on this little island, and represents so much more than just a natural, spring wild flower. It conjures up an imagined spring time of the past, when life was a rural idyll, and there were woodlands everywhere full of bluebells, and probably happy milk maids and jolly ploughmen too.

If only it were thus.

Still, a bluebell wood is a marvelous place to be, if you are lucky enough to get to be in one, and regardless of it’s colour a bluebell is a beautiful portent of good things to come.