Fifty (million) shades of green

The fresh greens (and russets) of new leaves. — Nicola Bozic/Flickr

Let us now praise the color green.

It’s the color of spring, the color of life, now so abundant everywhere you cast your eyes. In the last few weeks, the treeline has taken on the tints of an Impressionist painting, soft watercolor hues of lime and chartreuse, apple green and verdigris.

Most people think of “leaf peeping” as strictly an autumnal phenomenon, but I find the view equally fine in spring, when a million shades of green make the landscape glow, a testament to the unstoppable progress of the season.

There’s an undertone of warmth to much of the spring foliage — the reds and pinks and russets of unfurling leaves burn briefly before maturing into their summer colors. Think of the peony pushing up its scarlet stems, or the orange clusters of seedpods draped artfully along the limbs of the red maple. The scarlets and purple of Japanese maple and purple-leaf plum add a bass note, deep and resonant.

There’s gold, too, in the first tender shoots of the willow, the gilded foliage of creeping Jenny and Hakone grass, the strange flowerheads of the euphorbia and the bold, solid shades of chartreuse barberry and golden privet.

Spring’s palette - chartreuse, verdigris and lime, seasoned with copper and gold. — Henry Burrows/Flickr

And let’s not overlook the blue-greens of juniper and white pine, the festuca and blue oat grass, of blue spruce and fothergilla. Even down low, where the woodland things live, the finely divided columbine leaves with their tints of blue and the glaucous hostas just now achieving size complete the palette of infinite variation on the theme of green.

I even love the chocolate colors — in the glowing bark of the cherries, the bloom of fuzzy brown in the undersides of rhododendron leaves, the tawny new shoots of sedge. The gorgeous foliage of my fern-leaf peony rivals its scarlet flowers when it first emerges, suffused with a brown-maroon-chestnut medley of color.

The new, true greens are settling in now, soothing and exciting, depending on the light. In the slanting rays of the strong afternoon sun, my lawn looks plugged in, a thick, electric-green pelt on the animal earth. Yet in the duller colors of a rainy, fog-bound day, the maturing greens of lawn and trees are silvered with beaded droplets of water, and seem to recede into a chiaroscuro haze.

Green, green — so much green you could feel drunk on it, scarcely remembering how barren was the view just a few short weeks ago. The trees are assuming their full stature, cloaked in all that green, reminding you once again of their role as living architecture. At my place, the tree wall is filling in, obscuring the distant view of houses on the hill with walls and ceilings of green leaves, while the spruces are in a decorative phase, each forest-green branch tipped with pale green new growth.

All of that green is functional, as well as beautiful. It is the green chlorophyll in plant leaves that does the work of food-making for our friends the plants. The chloroplasts in plant cells are the factories of photosynthesis, manufacturing nutrients to keep the plant nourished, and releasing oxygen for us animals to breathe.

The golden spill of new weeping willow wands. — Herry Lawford/Flickr

The very air smells different in the spring — fresh and alive. How do we get by in winter, I wonder, without all that oxygenation? Are we breathing the exhalations of the South American rainforests, or are the seemingly dormant evergreens keeping us from gasping?

The Japanese are the gardeners who best exploit the potential of green, with serene gardens only sparingly accented with bright color.

Think of the smooth greens of clipped evergreens, the velvety carpet of moss, the feathery plumes of ferns. There’s no lack of subtlety in an all-green garden, though we in the West are obsessed with flower color and think primarily of fleeting blossoms when we plan our landscapes.

Shiny and dull, pale and deep, silvery and golden, green is the fundamental color of plant life, rivaled only by the blue of the sky and the deep blue sea. How right that seems, under the golden sun. On another planet, perhaps the color scheme would be different, with royal blue grass under a pale green sky, or russet ground cover under a rosy firmament. But I can imagine that only briefly, earthling that I am.

For now, in spring, green fills my eyes, soothes my mind and stimulates my urge to plant something and tend it. That is, after all, the story behind any green thumb. Buried in the rich, brown earth, those green thumbs know what color they’re conjuring. Green — sing its sacred praises in the first, lush flush of spring, when all the world seems new and uncreased.