What color is green?

Have you ever looked at paint samples in a hardware store? There must be a million or more different colors called green. I love the descriptions — spicy apple green, Mediterranean green, cactus green… How fun it would be to have a job dreaming up names for paint chips, or lipsticks, or hand lotions.

Back to the subject at hand. What color is green?

I feel truly blessed having a home on Bancroft Bay. The view from our living room window seems to be in a quiet, out-of-the-way place somewhere in northern Minnesota. The small bay has a tiny island in the middle and is surrounded by trees — river birch, weeping willow, oak, blue spruce, and some scrub brushy stuff that has volunteered to grow along the shoreline, and because it helps prevent erosion, we’ve allowed it to stay.

What color is green? I’ve no idea. On the bay it depends on the time of day, the time of year, whether the sun is shining or under a cloud. It even depends on the type of cloud. Then again, when it is raining, it depends on the kind of rain. The leaves can’t make up their mind about their color. Am I looking at the top of the leaf or the bottom, the veins or the surrounding tissue? Is each leaf glistening and shiny from ram drops, or flat on a cloudy day? In early spring the leaf is light and yellow tinted on the tip of a branch, and it is a deeper color closer to the tree trunk.

Even the water in the bay is undecided. The reflections of all of the trees and the sky are disturbed by the ripples, or the waves, or the sun as it moves overhead. What is green one moment is blue the next.

The flowers on the deck add to the confusion – the leaves on the marigolds, geraniums, lobelia, coleus, and dusty miller all add to the green hues. It’s an artist’s palette of yellow greens, blue greens, light and dark greens, grey and silver greens, sometimes all in the same leaf.

These greens are affected, too, by the chipmunks who insist on digging in the flower pots searching for seeds dropped from the bird feeder. With chipmunks, squirrels, and an occasional raccoon on the deck, I spend a lot of time replanting and cleaning up after them. Dead leaves are an entirely different green than healthy ones.

The dictionary describes color as “differing qualities of the light reflected or emitted by them.. .as in the individual’s perception of them.” That definition sounds like it could open up another entirely different conversation.

I thoroughly enjoyed a color design class at Austin Community College (now the Austin Riverland Campus). We spent an entire quarter comparing how one color affects another, enhancing or detracting from it. We learned how to make two very different colors look alike, and how to make one color look like different colors just by placing it over other hues. It was a fascinating class.

Once when I was in a Toastmasters and it was my turn to choose table topics, I asked each participant to describe his or her favorite color and tell us why. The response I remember was the color yellow. The gentleman said, “That was the color of the dress my wife was wearing on our first date.” Wow!

A few years later, I was teaching a storytelling class, and the students went home each afternoon with an assignment for the following day. They were given a topic and told to write a story to read or tell in class. Near the end of the week, the assignment was “color.” They could write a story about any subject as long as it was color related. When it was her turn to share, one of the students walked up to the front of the room and then sat down on the floor. As we all watched, looking down on her, she described the world as she saw it from the perspective of a blade of grass. I listened, amazed. She had put so much thought and understanding into her story. I couldn’t help but think of how she could use that natural creativity with her other subjects in school. Later, when we had some time together, she told me that she didn’t like school and was not looking forward to the next year. I hope that she found a teacher who understood.

What color is green, or yellow, or red, or blue, or purple? You are surrounded by an artist’s palette.

Bev Jackson Cotter is a member of the Albert Lea Art Center which is showing the nature photography of Dustin DeBoer during the month of July. The Art Center is open from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.. Tuesday through Friday.