Frangipani Flower Colours
As mentioned elsewhere on this site, the frangipani rubra is the most common species of frangipani in Australia. There are hundreds of flower colour variations in Australia, and possibly thousands worldwide, within the rubra species. If you look at a frangipani flower from a distance, it will most likely appear to be either yellow, orange, red or pink. The yellow category can be divided to create a cream and a white category. On the other end of the spectrum, pink can be divided to create a purple or a blue category.
Our Flower Categories
At Efrangipanis, we group of frangipani flowers into about five categories. If a flower is completely, or nearly completely, yellow when it firsts opens and appears yellow from a distance, we include it on our “yellow” category. If a flower starts with a white flower with yellow in the centre and looks white or cream from a distance, we call it a “white”. We do not have a special cteagory for purple or blue frangipani flowers so if we do stock or sell them, they are included in our “pink” category.
Rubra Flowers
Even though “rubra” means red in Latin, the Frangipani rubra species is responsible for almost all of the beautiful frangipani flower variations. If you look at the below colour wheel, you can see that the frangipani flower colour spectrum spreads around from the purple to the yellow with the orange and red in between.
Frangipani Flower Fragrance
Almost all frangipani rubra flowers have strong scents. At Efrangipanis, we only keep a frangipani with a mild scent, if it’s a popular colour, like “red”. We also only keep a frangipani without a noticeable scent if it’s a unique frangipani species, such as pudica and cuba. Different colour flowers have different scents. Frangipani scents are sometimes fruity like peach or citrus and sometimes they resemble other flower species like jasmine or gardenia. The strength of the emitted fragrance varies greatly depending on other factors such as weather and time of day. The dim light of evening and humidity are usually helpful.
The best way to compare frangipani scents is to collect as many varieties as you can. Helping people build their frangipani collection is very rewarding for us too!
I’m interested in buying a frangipani with an orange flower. What are the options? Which ones do you recommend?
Hi Darren. Let me start by saying most orange looking frangipani flowers are actually pink and yellow when looked at from a close distance. As described on this page, our eyes see orange when red and yellow or pink and yellow are merged. Pure orange frangipani flowers are quite rare. The one I like the most is called Apricot.
The most common orange flower is the fruit salad which is has yellow and pink bands and has some white which increases as the flower fades in the sun. This orange, pink and white appearance is the reason it’s also called the Tricolour frangipani. Other frangipani flowers also get called Tricolour but the Fruit Salad frangipani is the most common. The Cooktown Sunset is another orange tricolour but it has a darker or redder pink and a darker or more orange-like yellow.
It takes a beautiful mind to see beauty in a flower. A traumatized and stressed mind cannot see beauty. Also, looking at beautiful things in life, like frangipani flowers, can nudge a mind from traumatized towards beautiful. God Bless!