Orange roses (original) (raw)

Sharon Gray of Bay Area Geriatric Care turned up yesterday with a surprise present for my 85th birthday: a big vase of orange roses (on the pinkish or peach side of the color), because those were the really big and beautiful roses she could find on the spur of the moment, without assigning any meaning to the color (though I’m a Princeton A.B., rah rah orange and black and all that), and indeed not knowing what the particular variety was named (you wouldn’t believe how many rose-growing companies there are in the world and what an encyclopedia of names they have registered for orange cultivars). Now located right in my line of sight as I type at my worktable:

Roses of the Orange 85th; for roses, orange seems to be the color of joy, enthusiasm, and desire, and that does feel like a good fit for me

Now, how the color orange came to be associated with Princeton is a remarkably tangled tale involving the Holy Roman Empire (the tale begins in 1163), the French region of Provence (the town of Orange), the Rheinland-Palatinate region of Germany (the town of Nassau), the Netherlands, and of course William-and-Mary, rulers of Great Britain and Ireland. Quite remarkably, oranges the fruit and the color orange have nothing to do with all this, or at least didn’t until Princeton (founded in 1746) adopted orange and black as the official colors for academic gowns in 1896, which is virtually yesterday in this context (I mean, my father and mother were born in 1914). What the story does have to do with is mostly the astounding rapacity of the great bulk of the ruling classes. I will attempt to fill in some of the details in a forthcoming posting, but today I just want to enjoy those roses.

This entry was posted on September 7, 2025 at 7:04 pm and is filed under Color, Events and occasions, History, Language and plants, My life, Signs and symbols. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.