Colours of nature and renewal

Red ochre is used in Aboriginal rock art and ceremony, and is traded over long distances. In the Aboriginal flag the red half stands for the earth and for that ochre.

The copihue, a climbing plant with waxy red bell flowers, is the national flower. The men's football team plays in red and is called La Roja.

The red cross in the flag stands for the fire of the island's volcanoes. It was added to an earlier blue and white flag.

Marrakesh is called the Red City. Its walls and buildings are made of, or painted to match, the reddish clay of the plain around it.

Cochineal, a deep red dye made from insects that live on prickly pear cactus, was raised in Oaxaca long before the Spanish came. It became one of New Spain's most valuable exports.

Himba women cover their skin and plaited hair with otjize, a paste of butterfat and red ochre. It protects against sun and insects and is held to be beautiful.

The pohutukawa tree covers itself in crimson flowers in December, and is known as the New Zealand Christmas tree.

Andean weavers have dyed alpaca and cotton with cochineal for well over a thousand years. Peru is today the world's largest producer of the dye.

The watermelon, red, green, white and black like the flag, became a stand-in for it in art and on social media at times when showing the flag was restricted.

Country cottages and barns are painted Falu red, a deep red with white trim. The paint is made from the waste of the old copper mine at Falun.

Turkey red was a bright, fast red for cotton, made from madder root by a long process worked out around Edirne. European dyers spent much of the 1700s trying to copy it.

The red berries of the viburnum, kalyna, are a national symbol. The song Oi u luzi chervona kalyna, the red viburnum in the meadow, became an anthem of resistance after 2022.

The lowest band of the flag is orange, often called apricot, after the national fruit. The constitution says it stands for the creative talent and hard work of the people.

The flag shows the island in copper orange on white. The colour recalls copper, which was mined here in ancient times and may have taken its name from Cyprus.

Amber washed up on the Baltic shore is called the gold of the north. Gdansk has been a centre for working it since the Middle Ages.

The flag is green with an eagle and three stripes. The orange stripe is for copper, the country's main export, and the football team is called the Copper Bullets.

On Pohela Falgun, the first day of spring, young women wear yellow and orange saris, a shade called basanti, with flowers in their hair.

Yellow daisies called adey abeba cover the highlands at the end of the rains in September. Children give bunches of them at Enkutatash, the New Year.

The flag is yellow, green and red: yellow for the sun and fields of grain, green for the forests and red for the blood shed for freedom.

The lower band of the flag is yellow, read as fields of ripe wheat under the sky. The two colours go back to the arms of Lviv and medieval Galicia.

The green field of the flag stands for the land and its rice fields. Many people also read it as the youth and vigour of the country.

The flag is white, green and red. The green band, which took the place of the blue in the Russian flag, is read as the country's forests and farmland.

The green field of the flag is commonly said to stand for the forests. It was first the colour of the House of Braganza, the family of the first emperor.

The mines of Muzo and Chivor produce emeralds prized for their deep green. The Muisca people traded them long before the Spanish arrived.

Green is the colour of Alliance 90/The Greens, one of the first environmental parties to enter a national parliament, in 1983.

In ancient Egypt green meant new growth and life after death. Osiris, god of the dead and of rebirth, was painted with green skin.

The green band at the top of the flag stands for the land and its fertility. Green, yellow and red are also the colours of sashes and umbrellas at Orthodox church festivals.

The green band of the flag stands for the forests and farmland. In kente cloth, green threads mean planting, harvest and growth.

Green stands for Ireland itself, the Emerald Isle, and for Saint Patrick's shamrock. On 17 March people wear green and a sprig of shamrock.

The green band of the national flag stands for the country's tie to the soil and to plant life, as Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan explained it when the flag was adopted in 1947.

For Nowruz, the new year at the spring equinox, families grow a dish of green sprouts called sabzeh for the haft-sin table. It stands for rebirth.

The flag is green, gold and black. The official reading is: hardships there are, but the land is green and the sun shineth.

The green band of the flag stands for the land and its natural wealth. In Maasai beadwork green is the grass that feeds the cattle after rain.

A green cedar tree stands at the centre of the flag. The cedars of Lebanon are named in the Bible and stand for holiness, endurance and peace.

The flag has two green bands with white between them. Green stands for the country's farmland and natural wealth, and white for peace. It was designed by a student, Taiwo Akinkunmi.

At Pentecost, called the Green Holidays, homes and churches are decked with birch branches and sweet-smelling herbs spread on the floor.

The green field of the flag stands for the land and its natural wealth. Red is for the freedom struggle and black for the people.

The flag has green for farming, yellow for minerals, red for blood shed in the liberation war and black for the people. A white triangle stands for peace.

The old colour word qing covers green, blue and the shades between. In the five-element system it belongs to wood, the east and spring.

The Torres Strait Islander flag has a blue band for the sea between green bands for the land. A white dhari, a dancer's headdress, sits at the centre.

The light blue of the flag stands for rain. In this dry country the word pula means rain, blessing and the national currency.

Prussian blue, one of the first modern synthetic pigments, was made by accident in Berlin in the early 1700s. It later coloured the coats of the Prussian army.

The flag is blue, black and white. Blue is for the sky, lakes and sea, black for the soil and the dark past, and white for snow, birch bark and hope.

The flag is a blue cross on white, called the Siniristilippu. The poet Zachris Topelius proposed the colours: blue for the lakes and white for the snow.

The light blue field of the flag stands for the Pacific Ocean around the islands. It set the flag apart from the dark blue colonial ensign.

The flag is blue and white, with nine stripes and a white cross. The colours are usually read as the sea and sky and the white of the waves and clouds.

The flag is blue with a red cross edged in white. The colours are read as the three elements of the land: blue mountains, white ice and snow, and red volcanic fire.

The flag is blue, white and green: blue for rain, white for peace and green for prosperity.

Fes is known for pottery painted in cobalt blue on white, called Fassi blue. In Marrakesh a strong ultramarine is named Majorelle blue after the garden where it was used.

The flag has blue for the sky, the Atlantic and rain, red for the people, green for the land, and a golden sun for life and energy.

Delft blue is tin-glazed pottery painted in blue on white. Potters in Delft began making it in the 1600s as a cheaper answer to Chinese porcelain.

Russian has two basic words for blue: siniy for dark blue and goluboy for light blue. Speakers treat them as two colours, as English speakers treat red and pink.

The flag has green for the land and blue for the Indian Ocean, divided by a black band for the people with yellow edges for mineral wealth.

The upper band of the flag is blue for the sky. Since 2022 buildings around the world have been lit in blue and yellow in support of the country.

Tanzanite, a blue-violet gemstone, is found in only one small area near Mount Kilimanjaro. It was named after the country by the jeweller Tiffany in 1968.

The Rose Valley near Kazanlak grows pink damask roses for rose oil. The harvest in late May and June is marked by a festival and the crowning of a Rose Queen.

Toulouse is called la Ville Rose, the pink city, for the soft pink brick of its old buildings.

Petra, carved into sandstone cliffs by the Nabataeans, is known as the rose-red city, from a line in a nineteenth-century English poem.

Pale pink is the colour of cherry blossom. In spring people picnic under the trees for hanami, flower viewing, and the short bloom is a common image for how brief life is.

Lake Retba, near Dakar, is known as Lac Rose, the pink lake. Salt-loving algae turn the water pink in the dry season, and workers gather salt from its bed.

Cotton is called white gold, and an open cotton boll appears on the state emblem. The white band of the flag stands for peace and purity.

The black band of the flag is also linked with the black coat that Estonian peasant men once wore.

The old name of the country, Kemet, means the black land, after the dark silt left by the Nile flood. To the ancient Egyptians black was the colour of fertile soil and new life.