The first magenta and green?

[Mike Weaver]

Peonies, geraniums, clematis, gladioli, etc etc. Magenta flowers, green 
leaves,  There are an awful lot of them around. The Forster curtain could 
well be a living thing.

For Pynchon, the significance of magenta, given the book's title could be 
that it is the colour that appears when the rainbow is wrapped into a wheel.

The Heath growing green and magenta is a  minor botanical quip - heath 
being another name for heather.

>d) magenta and the corresponding shade of green (and hot pink and electric 
>blue) are, for some reason, perceived by many as psychedelic

Opposite colours jump about when next to each other - make that Day-Glo 
paint and LSD altered vision and you have essence of psychedelia. One of 
the long suffered debates about GR is how much it maps on to the sixties.

Mike