Bromley House hosted one of the first photography studios in the world.  The darkroom featured a red and a blue filter.  The red one is still there, but the blue was lost a long time ago.

An early US visitor to the photographic studios in Bromley House, around 1850, remarked of the blue filter used by the photographer, that it was “snapdragon blue”.

The name stuck, but there was a mystery, because there’s no such thing as a blue snapdragon, right?

Turns out it was the name given to a plant the early settlers in North America that reminded them of the snapdragon they remembered from back home.  It’s actually native to Meso America, and its Latin name is Angelonia.  It secretes oil, not sugar, and is pollinated by oil bees, of which there are more than 30 types worldwide.