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Gardens may not be quite so interesting if you are colour blind because many flowers are difficult to distinguish from leaves, berries and fruit can’t be spotted easily and it is difficult to tell sometimes whether a plant is dead or alive. Donald McIntyre recounts in his book ‘Colour Blindness: Causes and Effects’ (see our online Shop if you are interested in buying this), an embarrassing incident for both him and the checkout operator at his local garden centre when he once tried to buy a rosemary plant which was actually dead!

Flowers and berries generally need to be identified by shape rather than colour and although picking strawberries is possible it can be a long, slow process. Many colour blind people find it very difficult to know which fruits are ripe.

G’s story (aged 10) about a trip to the local Pick Your Own farm with her younger, colour blind, brother….

Last Summer we had some visitors from Barbados who came to stay. My my mum and dad wanted to take them to do typical English things with us and one day we took them to pick strawberries. After we got there my brother got told off. Mum thought he was messing about because he kept putting white strawberries in the basket. Mum told him not to waste the white strawberries. So my brother and the boy from the other family went off to the other side of the field and everyone else carried on picking. When we had collected enough strawberries dad called the boys back. My brother was carrying a basket full of beautiful ripe, red strawberries and mum was really pleased. She was really nice to the boys, but I was really angry because I saw my brother go over to a pile of baskets full of ready-picked strawberries and pinch one. I had been trying really hard to pick some nice strawberries but mine weren’t as nice. When we got home I told mum where the boys had got their strawberries from and she told them off because someone had spent a long time filling up the basket and they had taken it without asking.

Normal Vision

Normal Vision

Deuteranopia

Deuteranopia

When this happened we didn’t know my brother was colour blind, but now mum says he probably did it because he was using one of his coping strategies to try and hide his colour blindness from other people. He said he did it because he was embarrassed in front of the visitors and he didn’t want the other boy to know that he couldn’t see the ripe strawberries. He could see the white strawberries easily so he just picked those.