About the colour brown

A freezing winter morning. Genoa River, Wangarabell.

Brown gets a bit of a bad rap. Sometimes I think it is more often associated with poo than of beauty, but maybe we should all see brown for its true colour, which is kind of every colour mashed together.

A brown bouquet.

Brown things are really nice. Actually, way more than nice, they’re brilliant and wonderful and miraculous. When I walk in the forest and take notice of the colours, I see brown everywhere I look. I wonder if brown can be found in almost every ecosystem on the planet? It is both under the ground, in the oceans, in towering trees, on feathers flying past, or busily swimming upstream. It is everywhere.

I find myself wanting to shout out all of the brown things that I appreciate most in the world.

So, here in this story with pictures I’ll share just a few things I love about brown.

My baby boy Rufus, a teddy rex guinea pig.

Brown probably isn’t the first colour people say when asked what their favourite colour is. It might not be the colour that you want your new kitchen painted or the fancy bed linen, but it is one of those colours, that once given a little light, truly shines, in a way only brown could shine.

I simply prefer the old and rusty over new and shiny. Every piece of rusted iron looks like an artwork I’d happily put on the wall.

Some of my favourite animals are brown.

Capybaras, for instance are all perfectly brown, and I wouldn’t want them any other way. There are snails and slugs that are the exact kind of brown needed to hide in among the leaf litter. There are dogs, mighty fine dogs, good, reliable, sturdy dogs that are brown. A brown dog is a good dog!

There are beautiful, plump brown hens in my garden. Dark brown wallabies who bound away from the forest track when I pass. Rodents and reptiles, fish and frogs, all shades of brown, in all manner of patterns.

What about the many brown birds out there? Like the female blue wren and the gorgeous lyrebird, wood ducks, sparrows and pheasant coucals. Kiwis, wedge-tailed eagles, bush-stone curlews, lady blackbirds and the radiant brown cuckoo-dove.

Sometimes all one needs is a splash of brown, like Rosie, our tiny Belguin D’Uccle hen.

Oh, the list really could go on for pages. I grit my teeth thinking about each of these animals and how much I adore them and would like to pat them.

Agnes and Gladdy resting in my studio.

Bruce, our three-legged rescue hound melting in front of the fire.

And now, as I sit here with my cup of tea, noticing the soft brown liquid I drink, simply made from tea-leaf stained water and a little splash of milk, I am totally convinced that I can’t live without brown. (Or tea? Tea! Oh tea, how I love thee.)

What about dark chocolate, walnuts, lentils and mushrooms? And burnt caramel, brown sugar and coffee! I want to have a Brown Dinner Party, and if it weren’t for covid19 lockdown, you’d all be invited!

A tiny bit of colour theory………..I want you to imagine walking around a garden, picking a bunch of flowers. Deep pink roses and purple iris, yellow sunflowers and orange calendula, blue larkspur and red cannas, all with a different green stems. Now pop your rainbow bunch of magnificent blooms in a food processor and turn it on. What have we now? Brown! It is the colour we end up with when we mix every colour together, the colour we would get if we could squash a rainbow into a jar and shake it up. Brown is every other colour. All of them in together.

Maybe brown is the after party, of the biggest party, that every colour of the rainbow was invited to?

A collection of brown I found in Dad’s garden.

Thinking about brown makes me think of the deep brown eyes of one of my daughters. I could dive right in and live in there forever. Maybe I know these eyes better than my own. I’ve looked into them for twelve years now. I love my husband’s hazel eyes and my dad’s soft brown eyes too. All so different. All so beautiful. All so brown.

An eye of a certain twelve year old girl I love.

Felafel, a long-haired guinea pig, wears a hairstyle no hairdresser could create!

But, let’s face it, there is no life without food. So, there is no life without poo! And most poo is brown. So, we literally can’t live without brown. Let’s celebrate poo then, for once it was colourful, and now it is not, but we lived another day and that poo is the proof . The proof is in the poo.

Rabbit poo. Always round. Always found in tidy mounds (or ‘toilets’), where rabbits will return every time they get that feeling.

After things die, they begin the fascinating process of decaying. When organic things rot or break-down they often become brown during the process. Colourful food scraps are eaten and digested by all sorts of beneficial creatures like worms and insects, through to microbes, eventually ending up as a rich deep-brown compost, the most valuable asset a gardener can get their hands on.

Our garden thrives on worm poo and compost.

This sweet smelling, black gold (really just dark brown) compost can help plants grow into healthy beasts, for it is their turn to eat, and turn all that brownness into healthy colourful fruit, vegetables and flowers, shoots and leaves. New life will grow, feeding on the brown stuff at the bottom of the worm farm, alongside a few other miraculous processes like photosynthesis, but that’s another story.

Some of the organic goodness made in the compost bin feeding out baby lettuces.

I am not going to lie, there are some brown things that I fear. I don’t ever want my teeth to go brown. I don’t ever want to see brown stains in my underwear. I don’t ever want to lose my sight and not be able to see colours, including brown. But maybe these brown fears can pop away on a brown shelf, and if they do happen to me one day, may I be so old and carefree that it isn’t a worry.

Right now, I’m going to pull off my brown Ugg boots and push my woollen socked feet into my favourite brown hiking boots. I’m going for a walk to celebrate all things brown. The aim of the walk is to notice brown. I will ponder over why it is brown, how long it’s been brown and what shade of brown it is. Meanwhile I know that Bruce, our brown dog will drag me along, with the intention of smelling all things, no matter their colour, but from my observation brown things smell the best to him.

A collection of brown.

This walk will probably bring me happiness because I will notice things that I might not previously seen. I know that there will be brown birds to identify, other brown dogs to pat (hopefully), brown brick houses to pass and a good amount of brown mud underfoot.

The sweetest brown striped fungi ‘shelves’.

Maybe you should go for a brown walk too? Imagine what goodies are waiting to be seen.

A tiny brown world inside a brown suitcase.