Red

Greens are tricky - you get the wrong hue or wrong saturation and they just look wrong.  Reds, on the other hand, seem to be pretty much red.  There are four little pans of red in my paint kit, and they all look about the same.  I have an evolutionary theory about this: Greens matter to us, because the difference between one green and another might be a diseased leaf versus a nutritious one, or a poisonous plant versus a healthy one.  With red, the fine discrimination doesn't matter - red means blood, or fire, or poisonous berry, or coral snake, and you really don't want to spend time debating if it's more on the crimson side or the scarlet side.  But when you have a mixed bowl of raspberries and red currants for dessert every night, you realize that there are different reds, and also different degrees of glossiness, and that is really hard to capture in watercolour.

Flowers in the local bog go through a pink phase in spring.  I'm pretty sure they co-ordinate the timing of this - they probably have a committee - and a co-operative "Pollinators prefer pink" marketing campaign.

The garden is also in a red phase, after it's purple spring juvenile phase, and before it's orange and yellow mature phase (we skip the sophisticated white phase around here, by design).

And even the sun is getting in one the act, in smoke-filled Vancouver, where it's red-in-the-morning all day long.