Episode 130 - Purple Magnolia

I’m sat in my parent’s garden as I write this, and as I do, I’m facing my Mum’s Magnolia tree. I say tree, it’s still in a plant pot, so think less towering monolith and more skinny bush. It’s currently flowering, great big flowers nearly the same size as the tree (that’s hyperbole), flowers which are distinctly purple in colour. This makes me question if anything I’ve ever learnt through my numerous trips to B&Q was in fact true. It also leads me to conclude that either the guys in the naming department at Dulux once played a practical joke that got way out of hand, or that Magnolias come in a variety of colours. A quick google search confirmed that my latter suspicion was true. Not just so, but to the extent that if you use the word Magnolia to refer to colour in different countries, there will be a very different understanding of what the colour that you’re referring to is.

This raises a large question; why on earth would anyone choose to name a colour after a flower which has a variety of different colours? Seriously though, why? Well, for all of my distracted googling, I couldn’t find an answer. I can only assume that the person who named it was unaware of this fact. It does seem like quite a large oversight, but to be fair, after seeing a whole bunch of Magnolia trees with white flowers, why would you think that there was anything different? (Yes, I did just refer to the colour Magnolia being synonymous with white, that’s because it is, and life would be much simpler if we didn’t have five million words for the same colour). 

It’s funny how it seems an obvious possibility with hindsight and yet such an easy assumption to fall into. I wonder too how quickly I fall into making such assumptions which lead to unnecessary confusion. Whether it’s being too quick to judge someone and put them in a box or not really listening to what someone is saying before making my reply. Or most of all, when I see only parts of what God wants to reveal to me and I try to make it the whole. When instead of searching for deeper understanding or waiting for further instruction, I get carried away and wrongly fill in the blanks myself. That’s when I get confused about what God is doing in my life because instead of listening, I try to second guess Him, forgetting that I can’t see what He can see and that not all Magnolias are Magnolia.