Sap, spring, sung green.
A miniature color story to welcome the season, plus poems and paintings!
I was having coffee with a friend a few weeks ago when our conversation turned to the color green. I had been talking about myself and how much I missed writing more regularly about color and objects, and how hard it’s been to find my footing in a new place, and how green I felt about it all (with envy, with inexperience, with bitterness), and she said, “I had a professor who told us about green.”
It was the lightest green, she said, the very first spring green that the ancients found most beautiful. “Like that,” she said, and gestured at the parking lot, where a bush was covered in early buds that seemed to float above the scrubby branches like a cloud. “They loved it because it was fleeting.” We went on to talk about how human it is to be drawn to the dawn moments, the first flush of color in a day or a bough. Like us, the ancients loved that nothing gold could stay; they knew that death and its inevitability is what gives beauty its ability to pierce, wound, and comfort. Spring green is ephemeral—it’s easy to miss, especially in a city. It comes on quickly, those tiny buds and shoots, then it roars into other colors. Some plants go deeper into green, turning blueish or grabbing the rights of emeralds. Others claw their way toward yellow, particularly the arid desert-dwellers. But for a moment, in April (or March or May or perhaps another month, depending on where in the world you live), we’re given the gift of verdance.
I went looking for more information about this, hoping to find a highly specific color name for this. And of course, there are plenty of bright-yet-light, vivid and warm, near-neon but softer, organic shades of green. There are fruits (kiwi, lime) and there are drinks (chartreuse, absinthe) and there are names that call to mind the burstingness of newly warmed soil, but I wasn’t really satisfied with what I found. Because none of the obscure greens could top sap green, or spring green, or even grass green. Sometimes, simple is best.
However, I did learn a new word. Virescence. It means “beginning to be green” or “greenish.” It means moving towards green, a transitory state of becoming greener. Sometimes, it’s used to mean green and glowing, like a worm.
And lastly, some poems to read on Beltane and a few lines, to give you reason to read them…
Binsey Poplars by Gerald Manley Hopkins
“My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled”
What Beauty Does by Patricia Spears Jones
“Everyone is a thief out West. If you leave your bikes on the porch
They disappear. If you find water, someone else will divert it.
There are those who fight about the wind. Others the sun.”
Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas
“Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”
Green by D.H. Lawrence
“The dawn was apple-green,
The sky was green wine held up in the sun,
The moon was a golden petal between.”
And lastly, an entire Emily Dickinson, because we deserve it and it’s perfect.
A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown –
Who ponders this tremendous scene –
This whole Experiment of Green –
As if it were his own!
Virginia Woolf's sitting room in Monk's House is a shade of green like this -- the closest modern equivalent I can find to it is Arsenic by Farrow & Ball. Her sister mocked her for loving green so much, but she adored it and kept it and now when you visit—especially since the room is dug into the ground and only has high, flower-level windows—it feels like swimming in an algae-covered pond or rolling among fresh wildflower stalks.
I finally found someone with the same level of love for this color 💚
Thank you for broadening my vocabulary with such wonderful new words, magical.