Before I carry on with the building of the garden, I thought I'd write a little bit about deuteropathy, or what's commonly referred to as being colour blind. Deuteropathy is only one form of many colour perception issues, but they're all basically down to defects in the cones in the retina of the eye. These cones detect red, green, and blue light and it's essentially a genetic disorder that can't be cured. If you have the gene that means your cones don't work properly (or at all, in some cases) then you're stuck with it for life.
I was diagnosed quite young - eight or nine years old, as memory serves. I remember my mother being called into school after I'd done the test with the numbers hidden in the dots (it's called the Ishihara test) and she sat next to me as we did the test again. They hadn't bothered to tell me what was going on - all I knew was that I'd been pulled out of my lesson to be in an office with my mother and I thought I was in trouble for something.
As the test progressed, and I called out the numbers I could see, my mother kept stopping and saying 'no, that's not right' and looking at me like I'd grown an extra head. At the end of the test, it was finally explained to me that I was 'red/green and red/brown colour blind.' I know now that such a label isn't actually a thing, but I'll presume it's down to the memory of an eight year old who wanted to be an astronaut when he grew up. Oh, and that career was now completely out of the question. I could forget all about being a pilot, or an electrical engineer, or any other job where colour perception plays a role, apparently.
So, yeah, if I didn't quite understand all of the detail at the time, it was because I was somewhat distracted by the sound of my dreams crashing to the floor because of my stupid eyes. I probably would have appreciated a less blunt approach, but it wasn't the first time my eyes had caused me pain, and it wouldn't be the last.
I've since learned that the name they give you depends on which of your cones are affected - in my case, I'm deuteropathic which means that my green light receptors don't work properly. Other common types affect the red and the blue receptors, and it's possible to have a complete lack of colour perception as well. Colour blindness is usually reserved as a term for the latter, but it's become a catch-all term in general usage and the vast majority of people don't really care about the subtleties. I'm deuteranomalous (where the cone works a bit) rather than deuteropic (where the cone doesn't work at all) but the upshot is that my colour perception around reds and greens is not good. That makes me an anomalous trichromat, which sounds like something out a sci-fi novel. It's the most common type, affecting around 5% of all men, but only around 0.35% of women due to the fact that the defect lies on the X chromosome. Women need two copies of the defective gene as it's recessive, so it's far less likely to occur in women. As an entire group, we colour blind peeps make up around 10% of the general population so it's actually a pretty sizeable chunk of the population.
I'll also clarify something else I get asked a lot: yes, I can tell what's red and what's green. It isn't like I can't see that a postbox is red, or a leaf is green. I know what the colours are, and they are distinct. What I can't tell apart easily is, say, the brown ball from the red balls on a snooker table - those particular shades of red and brown on that green table combine to make it hard to tell the brown ball apart. Hasn't done Mark Williams, Stephen Lee, Mark Allen, or Marco Fu or Peter Ebdon any significant harm in their snooker careers, but they are allowed to clarify with the referee if they're unsure whether it's the brown ball. And yes, potting the brown instead of the red by mistake has happened in live tournaments. But anyway, the point is that it's more about when they're similar to one another - that's when I struggle to tell them apart, and I have to rely on other information. In snooker, that might be the position of the brown if it stays on its spot. On the road, that might be the order of the traffic lights where we know the red is at the top and green is at the bottom. But you don't always have the luxury of positional information to fall back on.
Practically, this does have some impact in day-to-day life. Obvious things like clothing - I lost count of the amount of arguments I've had over wearing certain things together because they look fine to me, but apparently they aren't. We're talking severe colour clash fashion disasters. I ended up entirely avoiding khaki and similar colours and won't pair anything apart from black tops with camouflage pattern trousers. If I can't be trusted to dress myself in certain colours, I'll avoid them entirely to save the hassle. I generally wear jeans as they're pretty safe in terms of colour clashes. Buying anything to do with colour is usually a risky chore, and I'd need a seeing-colour-companion (usually my wife) to help. I usually find it's much safer to leave colour choices in interior decorating to her.
Other areas where this has an impact is on websites or applications - it's irritating how often red and green are used to distinguish between states, and if those colours aren't selected very carefully it can mean I can't tell them apart. Thankfully, some applications and games include a 'colour blind' mode these days but those that don't can be a real bind and I end up relying on position information rather than colour. That doesn't always work in fast-paced FPS shooters, and that's also a convenient excuse for why I'm not very good at playing those competitively and I'm sticking to it. Depending on a map's choice of colours, that might cause me problems under certain circumstances, and if a TV or other display isn't at least close to colour-calibrated then I'm going to have significant trouble sorting that out without outside help. Ironically, I'm more pedantic about colour on my TV than the rest of my family as a result.
Basically, if it involves colour, it's probably going to cause me problems. Meat going brown? Probably can't tell. Is that minced beef cooked or not? Can't tell. Picking a colour out of a range with names like 'olive' and 'khaki'? Yeah, not got a clue what those are meant to be. Graphs and charts using colour to distinguish at work? Nope, better have someone walk me through it.
Are there any advantages? Well, not being able to rely on colour to discriminate does mean that I tend to pay more attention to contrast and to shape. There's some evidence that suggests there is an evolutionary advantage in having non-standard colour perception - being better at spot camouflaged predators due to having a wider discriminatory range in certain colour spaces compared to people with normal vision. In my garden, that often translates to me being able to spot hidden wildlife better than my family - you're not as well hidden as you think you are from me, froggy.
The way I like to try to explain it to people is that you're looking at a TV screen and it has settings that let you set the red, green, and blue levels for the output colour. Could be a graphics program with RGB sliders for colour, too - it's your imagination; go wild. We'll set the colour levels all up to full and we'll pretend that means the TV now shows real-world colours. Yes, I'm well aware that's a complete lie and that most TV sets are all over the place, but this is only a way to visualize things. Anyway, to mimic what I see with my faulty green receptor, turn down the green level. Maybe half-way. Now, the intensity of all of the green colours has been massively reduced. The bright, vibrant greens are gone, and what's there is far more muted. The most egregious example of this for me is autumn, where people wax lyrical about the glorious colours of the leaves and all the different shades of green and I'm looking at the same thing and thinking 'nope.' To me, it's basically all much of a muchness.
But let's bring this back to the main purpose of this blog: gardening. What impact does having a faulty receptor for the colour green have when you're outside trying to create a pretty space out of predominatly green things?
Yeah. All kinds of screwed up.
It also applies to flower colours as well, so certain colours just don't pop in the same way that they would for people with normal vision. When someone talks about the acid lime zing of a euphorbia, for example, I'm not getting that. To me, it's a green flower not much different the the surrounding foliage and that impact is nonexistent. There's just not enough colour variation for me to find it interesting or attractive. Instead, what I need to lean on are the colours that do sing for me - and those tend to be blues and whites, vibrant yellows, high-contrast oranges, and fiery reds. Amusingly, it turns out that my preferences for flower colours also map really well to bee colour perception which basically means if I like the colour, most likely so will the bees. Given attracting pollinators is a key element in what I'm trying to achieve that's a really lucky crossover.
Aside from colours, I also like to have variegation in the leaf because that increases the colour contrast from the surroundings and makes it stand out more. I know there's a lot of purists out there who would say that variegation makes the leaf less efficient (true) and makes the plant weaker and harder to grow (often true) but hey, it's my garden. They can go be purist in their garden, and we'll both be happy.
Another element to consider is the form of the leaf - mixing up sharp, architectural, pointy leaves next to softer structures creates a point of interest. However, I do have to consider the contrast as they sit next to each other as well - two different leaf shapes of similar colour will be harder for me to tell apart. Realistically, this comes down to trial and error. I'll deliberately pair dark-leafed plants with light-leafed plants so it becomes more about the contrast, or sometimes I'll plant for flower colour and let the leaves form a background to those instead.
If I'm trying to grow fruit, I really wouldn't rely on me to decide whether they're ripe, either. Strawberries, I'm looking right at you. Is a plant turning brown and starting to die? No idea because I can't tell until it's too late to do anything about it.
What it comes down to, in the end, is that I'm trying to create a space that serves multiple functions. I need elements that do certain things (e.g. a pond for wildlife, or a seating area, or a play area for the kids, or plants for attracting pollinators or birds) and then I'm trying to create something that looks nice. Part of that is the structure, part of that is the colour, and part of that is trying to link things together through colour or shape. My colour blindness is a limitation on how well I can do some of those things with specific reference to colour ranges. It reduces the impact (for me) of some plants, and of the seasonal changes. What it doesn't do, though, is stop me creating impact in other ways instead. It only really rules out subtle and restraint planting schemes of varying shades of green, and insists that I have vibrant colours in the mix. Subtlety isn't my strong suit, so that's fine.
Sure, my choices of colour and shape and form might not appeal to other people - but it's my garden, not theirs. They're not the one spending time in it so if I can enjoy the effect that my planting choices creates then that's a job well done. I've always got my seeing-eye-wife and children to point out where something I've tried doesn't work, too - after all, the garden is much about their enjoyment as mine, so they get a say in what goes in there as well.
Being deuteropathic is a limitation, sure, and one that might get worse as I age. But often limitations become something that spurs you on as you strive to overcome. I was told I'd never be a pilot as a kid, but joined the Combined Cadet Force RAF section at school and got to fly planes with them - I even earned a solo glider pilot's licence. I was told electronics would be verboten, but I've rewired electric guitars, can easily handle household electrical work, and my degree included an electronics component that I passed with no particular issues other than having to get someone to verify my resistor selections where the colour coding caused me problems. Working as a computer programmer, I've made it a point to argue with designers over colour choices and to make accessibility an important consideration in anything I worked on.
A garden? It's just another challenge, and being challenged is what keeps life interesting.
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