A Natural History of Communication
Color is not a thing you see. It is a language, a chemistry, a history of obsession, a design problem, and a form of communication that predates every human word for it. Four chapters. One thread.
In 1814, a German geologist named Abraham Gottlob Werner published a small, extraordinary book. It was not about rocks. It was about color — specifically, a standardized vocabulary for describing the colors of minerals, plants, and animals without ambiguity.
The problem Werner was solving was real: two naturalists examining the same specimen would describe its color completely differently, making scientific comparison impossible. His solution was elegant. Instead of inventing abstract names, he named colors after objects in the natural world that consistently exhibited them.
Arterial blood red. Skimmed milk white. Duck green. Ash grey. These were not poetic flights of fancy — they were precise references to things any naturalist could observe firsthand.
Charles Darwin carried a copy of Werner's Nomenclature on the Beagle. When he needed to describe the precise color of a finch's beak or a lizard's underside, Werner gave him the vocabulary to do it with scientific precision.
The system contained 110 color terms, each defined by its natural source — a mineral, a flower, a feather, a bodily fluid. It was the closest thing the 19th century had to a color standard, and it worked because it trusted the observable world over abstract invention.
Werner's system fell out of use as synthetic dyes made color reproducible and standardized. But the names remain extraordinary — a kind of poetry that doubles as science. A reminder that the most precise communication often borrows from the most physical reality.
Werner's system directly inspired a personal project: a naming system and visual database for coleus varieties, organized by color, pattern, and pigment behavior. Where Werner named colors after nature, this project names nature by its colors — the same logic, inverted.
Explore Kate's Plant ShopBefore the mid-19th century, every color a painter used had to be physically extracted from the world. There were no synthetic dyes, no chemical substitutes. Blue required lapis lazuli from a single mine in Afghanistan. Purple required sea snails. Red required insects. The supply chains for color were ancient, global, and extraordinarily expensive.
This scarcity shaped art history in ways we rarely discuss. The Virgin Mary is almost always painted in blue not for symbolic reasons alone — blue was simply the most expensive pigment available, and commissioning a painting with extensive blue was a public display of wealth and piety.
The industrial revolution changed everything. In 1856, an 18-year-old chemistry student named William Perkin accidentally synthesized mauve — the first synthetic dye — while trying to make quinine. Within years, synthetic dyes had collapsed the price of color and ended thousand-year-old pigment trades overnight.
The history of pigment is a history of chemistry, trade, toxicity, and obsession. Lead white poisoned the painters who used it for centuries. Emerald green contained arsenic. Vermilion was made from mercury sulfide. Artists died for their palettes.
Restoring a damaged photograph is fundamentally an act of pigment archaeology — reconstructing colors that have faded, shifted, or been lost to time. The same questions that faced historical pigment traders face every restoration: what was the original color, and how do you faithfully recover it from what remains?
Kathryn Ellis Photography & DesignMined exclusively in Badakhshan, Afghanistan, lapis lazuli was worth more than gold by weight in Renaissance Europe. Painters rationed it carefully, reserving it almost solely for the Virgin Mary's robes.
Extracted from the Murex sea snail — over 10,000 snails per gram. It became the color of emperors by law. "Born to the purple" was literal. The trade made Phoenicia wealthy for centuries.
Spanish conquistadors found the Aztecs using dried insects to produce the most vibrant red the world had seen. Spain kept the source secret for nearly a century, making it their most valuable import after silver.
In 1858, scholar William Gladstone made a strange observation while studying Homer: the ancient Greek texts almost never used the word blue. The sky was "bronze." The sea was "wine-dark." Either Homer was colorblind, or ancient Greeks experienced color differently from modern people.
Linguist Lazarus Geiger extended this research and found the same pattern across ancient texts in nearly every language: no word for blue appears in ancient Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, or Arabic. In Sanskrit, the word for blue is the same as the word for black.
In 1969, anthropologists Berlin and Kay showed that across 98 languages, color terms appear in a predictable evolutionary order. All languages with two color terms have words for black and white. The third is always red. Blue is never named until green already exists.
The word "orange" didn't exist in English until the 1500s, arriving from Arabic via Portuguese with the fruit itself. Before that, the color was called geoluhread — yellow-red. The object named the color, not the reverse. Which raises an uncomfortable question: do we see colors we don't have names for?
Genealogical research is, in part, a study in historical vocabulary. The same problem that faced Werner — imprecise, inconsistent language making comparison impossible — appears in census records, vital documents, and family papers across centuries. A person described as "swarthy" in 1880, "mulatto" in 1900, and "white" in 1920 may be the same individual. The words chose who they were allowed to be.
Ellis Family Research →The Pirahã people of the Amazon have no color terms whatsoever in their language — they describe colors entirely through context and approximation, much as English speakers might say "the color of the sky." This suggests that color vocabulary, far from being hardwired, is entirely cultural. A language adopts color terms only when its economy and material culture require precision about color. Naming something is not seeing it — it is deciding it matters enough to remember.
When you look at a red rose, you're seeing chemistry. The petals contain anthocyanin molecules that absorb most wavelengths of light and reflect only red back to your eye. The color exists in the material — destroy the pigment, destroy the color.
When you look at a peacock feather, something entirely different is happening. The feather contains no pigment at all. Its iridescent blue-green is produced purely by the physical structure of the feather's microscopic architecture — a lattice of air pockets that causes light waves to interfere with each other, reflecting only specific wavelengths. Grind the feather to powder and it turns brown. The color was never in the material. It was in the structure.
This distinction — pigment color vs. structural color — is one of the most underappreciated ideas in biology. Structural color is found in morpho butterflies, hummingbird feathers, cephalopods, some beetles. It is almost always iridescent because the interference effects change with viewing angle.
Plants are almost entirely pigment-based. Chlorophyll gives them green. Carotenoids give them yellow and orange. Anthocyanins give them red, purple, and the extraordinary range found in coleus. Understanding which pigment does what is essentially the same chemistry that makes autumn leaves turn — and determines why Black Dragon coleus appears almost black in low light.
Coleus is one of the most pigment-diverse plants in cultivation — a single variety can express chlorophyll, anthocyanins, and carotenoids in distinct zones within one leaf. Kate's Plant Shop focuses on rare and non-patented varieties, many selected specifically for unusual pigment expression: near-black anthocyanin saturation, bicolor pigment boundaries, and variegated anthocyanin distribution.
Browse Kate's Plant ShopChemical molecules absorb certain wavelengths and reflect others. The color is inherent in the material. Destroy the molecule, lose the color.
Nanoscale physical structures cause light waves to interfere, reflecting only specific wavelengths. No pigment — the color lives in geometry. Grind to powder, lose the color.