Green

In a comment on the previous post, Lorianne, with her usual astuteness, spoke about the greenness of Ireland and how it looked to her like "a tattered piece of green velvet stretched over a rock". I've only flown over Ireland, but it certainly looked like that from the air - and does in movies, too. I could see why they call it the Emerald Isle.

Which makes me think about the different qualities of "green". I feel so surrounded by it in Vermont, and find it so unremittant, that I've decided the only thing to do is go into it more - like the Inuit with their snow, and the Bedouin with their sand. We are leafy, frondy, grassy people here, we Vermonters. I think, living in a chlorophyll factory, that we take green for granted.

Ahead of me, outside the second-storey window, I can see nothing but green: the swaying leaves of a big maple tree, only a few feet from the glass. The scene in the photograph above was taken about half an hour ago when I walked up the hill in back of our house (click on the image for a larger view). I'm not showing you the development that stretches up the hill in the foreground, largely obscured by the edge of the hill itself - and it looks as if there are no houses at all across the valley. At this time of the year, all huamn-scale structures tend to get lost among the trees. If some twin of mine were to shoot a picture from a point opposite, on the other side of the valley, these new house which loom so large in my suburbia-is-coming consciousness and above our own home, down in the village, would be mere dots of white and cream and blue on yet another green hillside.

But seen at near-range, the variation among shades and qualities of green is nothing short of staggering. Maybe what we need are more names for green: the big Crayola boxes didn't even have enough choices, nor does English in general. As an erstwhile oil painter, I loved the names of paints and pigments: cobalt green, deep and pale; cadmium green; emerald; viridian; phthalo green (blue and yellow shades); malachite; Hooker's green; permanent green (regular and light); chromium green oxide; sap green; olive green; terre verte; green gold. Each had its own characteristics and the names themselves continue to conjure up images. But when I was painting landscapes, even these were never adequate because things in nature simply aren't a color that can be squeezed our of a tube. Nor can an emerald-green patch of moss be painted with emerald pigment, next to a sap-green leaf, and look anything like they do in reality. Nature is light and reflection as well as pigment, with actual perceived color influenced more by the quality of the sky and by the surrounding neighbors than our intellectual notions of what is red, blue, or green.

So, as a painter, I always found myself back where Lorianne and J. started, stretching a whole-cloth of green over a foundation of earth using a limited palette: blue sky, yellow sun, white light, chlorophyll, and ground-up rocks.

Comments

[Lorianne]

First, I have to admit that I'm now humming "It's Not Easy Being Green" in my head as I type this...

In my mind, green has always been what makes Vermont different from New Hampshire. You have the Green Mountains, and we have the White; Vermont is green, and New Hampshire is gray.

I'm always shocked & amazed to see spring green...and then to watch as it matures into summer green. Surely there's a word for the deep, saturated hue of mature foliage...not quite evergreen, or hunter, or forest...

[Marja-Leena]

This is really beautiful, Beth! You are so right about aall those differnet hues of greens that no paint can quite match. Do you also find that when you have been away from home for a bit, and upon coming back you "see" it all again like with new eyes? I do, everytime I come home to lush and green Vancouver and my garden.

[susurra]

right about the hues and right about how Ireland seems to especially illuminate a huge range of those greens. The range of differentiation in the greens there amazed me. and I'm from Portland, where there is LOTS of green. but not the same range of green hues.

[language hat]

Verde, que te quiero verde...
http://community.webshots.com/album/196854736NLdpKK

[Coup de Vent]

I always feel in awe of greens. Inadequate, humbled. A taken for granted colour. Perhaps if "green" was a species of plant and not a name for a colour it would not be called green but broken down into a whole heap of different species.

[jonz]

The green I love is that early spring green that slowly crawls up from the wet valleys and onto the hillsides. It always looks so edible as it rolls up the winter greys and browns. I never can make a picture of it that I'm satisfied with.

[gulnaz]

that was wonderful, the way you stretched the entire panorama of greens in front of us! My favourite green is the colour of a new leaf, when sunlight falls on it but then the dark, glossy greens of palm trees on a rainy day look enticing too!

[leslee]

It's green here, too! I was posting photos of green vines last week, plus one (mostly about fresh basil) titled with an English translation of "Verde, que te quiero verde": http://3rdhouseparty.typepad.com/blog/2005/07/green_how_i_wan.html

Having grown up in NH I can agree with Lorianne that Vermont is always greener. Massachusetts is also quite green now, but still in a lower key than Ver-mont. We are envious (green). ;-)