THE COLOR OF YEARNING

by KASSIA ST. CLAIR

Kassia St. Clair is a London-based writer and author of The Secret Lives of Color (2016) and The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History (2018). She holds an MA in history from Oxford University and writes about history, culture, and design for publications including The Economist, Wired, and the Times Literary Supplement. She is currently writing a book about an improbable early-20th-century automobile journey from Peking to Paris.

Wassily Kandinsky, who boasted an array of strong opinions on colors, was rather ambivalent about green. While he believed it was “the most restful color that exists,” he also thought it passive, wearisome, and “‘bourgeoisie’⁠— self-satisfied, immovable, narrow.”1 His naked distaste is jarring. Humans are more usually to be found struggling toward green rather than shying away from it. It is valued and valuable. We miss it when it is gone. It is a color that is seemingly perpetually, tantalizingly, right there. At the tips of our fingers. All too often just out of reach.

Although nature and the natural world is conspicuously multi-hued⁠ it has long been symbolically aligned with green.2 But this seemingly instinctive association between nature and green is not surprising: we have depended on greenery for food and grazing from the earliest days of our species. We seek it out, thriving in places with regular growing seasons. During colder, drier months we await the signs that spring is on its way: veils of green stealthily drawn over fields and hedgerows. The tender green of buds, sprouts, shoots, and tips all of a sudden alive and awake and pushing their way up and toward the light.

Chlorophyll—the pigment in plants responsible both for their color and their ability to harness energy through photosynthesis—is the bedrock of the food chain. In addition to food, plants give us shelter. They can be used to build walls and thatch roofs. Some, like cotton and flax, can be used to create textiles with which we make nets, string, and rope, or clothes to protect our delicate bodies. From others we can produce dyes⁠ of almost any tint imaginable (although, strangely enough, these dyes seem very rarely to be green). Plants can also be used to produce paper, the medium on which we record our thoughts, our lives, our creations. Green, then, can stand in for life itself.

The human yearning for and dependence on green is also embedded in language. The ancient Egyptians’ hieroglyph for this color, for example, depicted a papyrus frond, a beloved and supremely useful plant, and it was further associated with positive attributes, including fertility and rebirth. The English word, like its German cousin grün, springs from the same Proto-Indo-European root: ghrē-, to grow. Similarly, vert (French) and verde (Spanish and Italian) share a Latin ancestor, viridis, which was related to virere, to “be green,” and gave the English tongue the words verdure, viridian, and verdant.

Although its opposite on color wheels is red, it is fascinating how often writers and philosophers contrast green with grey. The English poet Algernon Swinburne wrote of “Green pleasure or grey grief.”3 For Johann von Goethe it was theory that was grey, while “actual life springs ever green.”4 Culturally, it has also been the rural to grey’s urban; the growth to its withering. Kandinsky, funnily enough, wrote that a “silent and motionless” grey could be “produced by a mixture of green and red, a spiritual blend of passivity and glowing warmth.”5

Still, green spaces and surroundings are clearly important to us. The idea that green soothes the eyes is an old one: Virgil, Pliny, and other Roman writers mention it. Indeed, crushed emeralds were said to make efficacious eye balms. More practically, the meditative exposure to woodland spaces, known as shinrin-yoku or forest bathing, has been an official part of Japan’s national health program since the early 1980s. Other countries have followed suit. Some $4 million were spent in the decade after 2004 researching the potential health benefits of access to green spaces and the results have been encouraging. A study by King’s College in London, for example, showed that mindful time in green spaces could reduce cortisol levels and blood pressure.6

Green enclosures in the form of manicured gardens loom large in our imagination, particularly when it comes to picturing pleasure, salvation, and paradise. The Ancient Greek pantheon frequented sacred groves, lush pastures, and orchards. True believers, according to the Qur’an, are promised “gardens, beneath which rivers flow, wherein they abide eternally, and pleasant dwellings in gardens of perpetual residence.”7 Green is also inextricably linked in Islam with Muhammed, who is believed to have worn green clothing in life and, after his death, to have been covered with yet more green cloth. Christians, for their part, have the Garden of Eden, the fecund paradise from which Adam and Eve, the first humans, were expelled in shame after sampling the forbidden fruit.

Naturally enough, those on earth have sought to recreate such heavenly spaces in the physical realm. The earliest earthly paradise is thought to have appeared in what is now southern Iraq around 5,000 BCE when irrigation techniques allowed people to transfigure the desert into a leafier, greener land. Nearby, several millennia later, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon—known as one of the Seven Wonders of the World— were laid out and carefully tended. Gardens like these were created as a show of wealth (they required time, patience, and money to perfect), but also as locations in which to socialize. Those who tend their equivalents today are said to possess green fingers or thumbs.

Green spaces like gardens, woods, and forests make for ideal dramatic and literary settings, offering ample opportunities for private trysts, public displays, hunting, and feasting. Rigid social norms, relatively easy to police inside, loosen like untied stays once turned outside into the fresh air and verdure. During the Middle Ages, this was formalized by the French court, which on the first day of May encouraged s’esmayer, or “wearing of May.” This meant courtiers dressing in green, or donning crowns or necklaces of leaves and flowers, and then parading and participating in expressions of courtly love.

As well as delighting in cultivating exterior gardens, it has been common for centuries to draw elements of the greenery outside into our interiors. William Morris’s dense foliate designs immediately spring to mind, but styled tendrils, shoots, branches, fruit, flowers, and vines are foundational elements and motifs in almost all the decorative languages humans have built up. Romans, to pluck one example, delighted in vegetative decorations. The Villa of Livia, situated just north of Rome, was decorated around 20 BCE with extraordinary frescoes of garden views. And, in 16th-century Sussex, England, an inventory of Arundel Castle conjures a home swathed in leafy green, from carpets and curtains to “verdures” – tapestries depicting woodland scenes.

It is perhaps apt here to introduce green’s darker side. After all gardens, if left untamed, shade into wilderness, which, while not exclusively hostile, certainly have their perils. Green spaces are often filled with complex, obscuring shadows. Piquant delights may lurk under green canopies, but so too do sins and terrors: poison, avarice, jealousy—Shakespeare’s “greene-ey’d Monster”—and, of course, the devil and his creatures, foremost among them the biblical serpent, forked tongue vibrant against glossy emerald skin.

Even green’s most ardent admirers have found it ephemeral. Green passions—whether negative like greed or positive like youthful love—often burn out quickly, leaving the sufferer off balance and humiliated. Green colorants have proved equally inconstant. Those tapestries on Arundel Castle’s walls probably owed their color to two dye baths, the first one blue and the second yellow. Over time, and with exposure to sunlight, the yellows were wont to fade and disappear, the foliage turning wan shades of teal and cerulean.

For artists, pure green options are limited. Earth green or terre verte—a naturally occurring mixture of clay and iron silicate— is a reliably cheap pigment. But, although soft, buttery, and easy to use, it discolors over time and is usually rather dull in tone. For something more vibrant, artists struggled with greens procured from copper, such as verdigris, which appears on copper exposed to salt, water, and air – like the sea-foam crust that adorns the Statue of Liberty. Verdigris has been purposely produced as a pigment since at least the 4th century BCE by exposing sheets of copper to something containing acetic acid, usually wine or vinegar. The resulting green pigment was relatively saturated, but Leonardo da Vinci warned that verdigris “loses its beauty like smoke if it is not quickly varnished.”8 And it can also react with other pigments, like lead white, and even the surfaces on which it is painted, sometimes gnawing through the canvas or parchment of an unwary or unskilled user.

Worse, however, was to come. In 1775 Carl Wilhelm Scheele, a Swedish chemist, created a cheap and versatile new green the color of freshly shelled peas. In a world starved of good green pigments it caused a sensation, appearing in dress fabrics, wallpapers, and artificial flowers, as well as artists’ palettes. Charles Dickens was only prevented from decorating his entire house in this one shade thanks to his wife, who took against it. This was fortunate for Dickens, since by the 1870s doctors and scientists began uncovering alarming cases of poisoning involving Scheele’s creation. It was proven to contain large quantities of arsenic, which, depending on the conditions in which this green was prepared and kept, could release fatal toxic fumes. It was long believed that one of this pigment’s victims was Napoleon Bonaparte, who passed away in 1821 on the damp island of Saint Helena in a room decorated with a Scheele’s green wallpaper.

More modern green pigments have been scarcely less troublesome. Pigment Green 7, used in plastics and paper, contains chlorine; so too do Green 36 (used in inks and plastics) and Green 50 (an especially durable pigment used in heat-resistant coatings). All of them make it difficult to recycle green products safely and effectively. And yet green has long since established itself as the color of the environmental movement. We have green power, green homes, greenwashing, green trends, and green politics. Italy, Austria, Germany, Belgium, the United States, Finland, Japan, Indonesia, Senegal, Egypt, France, Australia, and many other countries have “Green” parties. While their policies, priorities, and styles differ, their broad aim is to restore the planet’s health and ours, and, perhaps, reimagine the world as the kind of garden idyll that humans have always yearned for. This may not sound controversial—who, after all, could argue against paradise?—but, naturally, things are not so simple. With green, as Kandinsky perhaps divined, they rarely are.

1 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Dover Publications, 1977), 38. 2 If anything, the planet is more ocean blue than it is viridescent, as the iconic 1972 “Blue Marble” photograph demonstrated. 3 Algernon Charles Swinburne, “A Match,” in Poems and Ballads (1866). 4 Johann von Goethe, Faust, Part 1 (1808) in Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (Oxford University Press, 2014), 348. 5 Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 39. 6 I. Bakolis et al., “Urban Mind: Using Smartphone Technologies to Investigate the Impact of Nature on Mental Well-Being in Real Time,” BioScience 68, no. 2 (2018): 134–45. 7 The Qur’an, Verse 9:72. 8 Leonardo Da Vinci, quoted in M. van Eikema Hommes, Changing Pictures (Archetype, 2004), 69.

"Napoleon in Vines" by Samuel Ridge (2021)