Why this popped into my head today, who knows, but it did. I thought that perhaps it was not one colour but rather shades of blue and violet. It turns out – surprise, surprise – that I am not the first person to ponder this. Ecologist, author, and podcaster, Matt Candeias, also pondered this question, thinking that perhaps yellow would win in the colour-game. It turns out that he, too, was not the first to ask this question, but his research gave me the answer to my question. In short, we don’t have a definitive answer to the question of what the most common flower colour is in the world. Matt explains that there are all sorts of challenges involved in coming up with an acceptable answer, including the subjectivity of colour: what is orange to me might be red to you.
Realistically, the most common flower colour is probably green, because many plant species produce small green flowers that go unnoticed by humans, who tend to pay attention to things in the natural world that are bright, big or flashy. Which begs a follow-up question: what colour is the least common in flowers? And the answer to that would be black. Apparently, pure black flowers don’t exist in nature: what we perceive as black always has a touch of red or purple in the mix, according to Hans Kapiteyn in The Guardian.
And that’s that.