Color Charts 
Fletcher Steele 
The Garden Club of America has its Committee on Color 
Charts, which means that there is no occasion to explain here how 
desirable it would be to have a color standard which would be ob- 
served by nurserymen in their catalogs, gardeners in their gardens, 
and Horticultural Societies in their judging and description of new 
plant varieties. We are and must be practical people during work- 
ing hours. It does not help us in arranging our flower combinations 
to know that a new Gladiolus glows hke the aurora over the ice 
fields of the Southern pole. That is stuff for poets and our leisure 
hours. Bad as it sounds, we would rather be told that it is Ridgway 
5"oo-R. f. or Repertoire 139 (i) or any other queer cryptic sign, 
if only we can initiate ourselves into the secret by turning the pages of 
a book. 
The real difficulty in the way of this procedure arises when we 
hunt for such a book. At present there are two possible charts, the 
"Repertoire de Couleurs," published by the Societe francaise des 
Chrysanthemistes, and the plates in Dr. Robert Ridgway's "Color 
Standards and Color Nomenclature." 
The Repertoire (forgive the nicknames in an article sternly limited 
in length by an obdurate editor) has advantages to which we must give 
due attention. It was made, after long, careful experiments by ex- 
perts, for use in matching flower color. In conception and execution 
it was international in scope, and hence we might well hope for uni- 
versal adoption if it had not been for the confjision and disability 
entailed by a recent most ungardenlike event in Europe. As it is, the 
edition is exhausted and the book difficult to obtain. 
A more serious objection is to be found in the method of presenta- 
tion. The colors are printed. Printed color that wiU not change with 
time and exposure to the Hght has not yet been invented, and the 
method which was used in the Repertoire is liable to marked varia- 
tions, not only from deterioration but even during the process of the 
press. In other words, one cannot be sure that a sheet of color will 
not change from year to year, nor that it is precisely like the nursery- 
man's corresponding sheet in the first place. To be sure the difference 
would be negligible in most cases. But from time to time it might 
be serious, especially if large and costly orders were under considera- 
tion. 
Finally, the Repertoire is pubHshed in awkward form. It comes in 
two portfoHos of loose sheets, which are easy to distribute about the 
garden but difficult to collect again. To be sure, it is more satisfac- 
tory to have a loose sheet for the actual mechanics of color matching, 
yet it takes twice as long to find the desired sheet in a portfolio, 
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