WHICH came first, the colour orange or the orange fruit? Well, the colour has been around since the dawn of time, whereas orange (citrus) trees have been around for mere millennia. So, there’s your answer. Except… the colour we know as orange was named after the fruit, probably in the 1400s. Before this, in Britain, shades of orange were referred to as saffron (after the stamens of the saffron crocus), or geolucrog (which translates from Old English as ‘yellow-saffron’; crog was another name for saffron), or geoluread (yellow-red). Let’s take a closer look at both the orange colour and the orange fruit!
■ Over the centuries, orange things were usually described as red: think of robin ‘redbreast’, red squirrels, red deer, red hair, and so on.
