Safflower紅花

Last week, I bought these beautiful flowers at the local flower store to bring some color and freshness to the Smith`s school of Englishスミス英会話 in Fuse, Higashi-Osaka東大阪布施.These rich orange colored flowers are called Safflower紅花. Generally looking a little like weed, they have been known and used as spice, color and medicine since ancient Egypt time! So they already were imported to Japan in the fifth or sixth century, coming all the long way of the silk road. As in Europe, they have been used here to extract their color, thus the Japanese name “Benibana” 紅花,which means “red flower” in English.

Some of the English Conversation students 英会話生徒 also knew the flower quite well, and they could tell me a lot of interesting details. For example, one student told me that the color from the flower was used by the imperial family. The amount of colors Japanese used for the production of the Kimono is some quite amazing fact. If one things of the limited range of colors available in Europe before the artificial colors were invented in the midst nineteenth century, the rich use of a wide range of colors used for Kimonos is just amazing.

The students of Smith`s school of Englishスミス英会話 in Fuse, Higashi-Osaka東大阪布施 really like the flowers and often we have a chance to talk about them in English. Some will describe them, others can actually tell a lot about the flowers like the history of the Safflower here in Japan.

If you like to know more about the flower, try the wikipedia page in English or in Japanese.