The origin and development of the Royal Horticultural Society's colour chart

Horticultural colour charts emerged from the more general colour charts developed for natural history in the eighteenth century. During the nineteenth century, arising from the rapid development of plant breeding, there was a need for finer discrimination for the recording of colour in cultivated plants, resulting in the publication of colour charts specifically for this purpose. In the twentieth century a direct line of development that led to publication of the RHS Colour Chart (1966) can be traced. Other horticultural colour charts were devised during this period that were not directly linked to the RHS Colour Chart, and many of these were influenced by more general colour charts, such as the Ridgway Color Standards (1912) and the Munsell Color System (1915), and the evolving concepts of colour space. A preoccupation with standardization of colour nomenclature was an integral part of the development of horticultural colour charts, although latterly this has been replaced by systems of colour notation. The RHS Colour Chart can be seen as the product of many of these trends, that led to it becoming the internationally recognized colour chart still in use for horticulture.