Saturday, June 8, 2013

2 Yellow flowered Brugmansias

 Brugmansia sanguinea 'Midas'

 Chrome Yellow PbCrO4
Brugmansia x candida 'Clementine'
When these two Brugmansia started to bloom this week I immediately associated the flower colour with my old box of paints, little tubes of cadmium yellow followed by chrome yellow, and with being in the chemistry lab, where lead nitrate mixed with potassium chromate when filtered off, leaves lead chromate or chrome yellow. So chrome yellow was the colour description I settled on though it is probably easier to describe as taxi cab yellow, that yellow with a bit of orange in it. We owe the discovery of the colour to Frenchman Louis Nicholas Vauquelin (1763-1829) who was mucking around in a Parisian lab with a mineral from Siberia called crocoite from which he extracted chromium. It seems he was a bit of a plant boffin as well and has the distinction of having the genus Vauquelinia named for him, though Vauquelinia californica is a plant I may never come across.

2 comments:

  1. Now it's my turn to have a tune in my head courtesy of a blog! Not that I mind, I always liked the song. I believe they're called ear worms....

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  2. Chrome yellow seems to be the right name to me. Our school buses are painted this colour, as it is highly visible.

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