I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. — Mark Rothko
I grew up in the faded colors of the American West. My house was in a subdivision on a straw-colored hill, overlooking tan fields crossed with neat rows of baled hay. On the mountain, the switchback highway cut through gradations of red-brown geological strata and ran alongside canyons of gray, basalt rock formations, dotted with skinny evergreens. At our cabin we had a rock garden: pieces of petrified wood, bleached of color, and sandstone slabs, whitely patterned with fossilized snails, set amongst smooth stones from the creek bed.
I’ve been fantasizing about the dry, pine-scented air of the mountain these past few damp weeks, so when I picked up Kassia St. Claire’s book, The Secret Lives of Color, I paged first to the colors of my childhood. There’s an entry for “fallow,” which St. Clair describes as “a faded, caramel-tawny color, the tint of withered leaves or grass.” It’s one of the oldest color names still in use in the English language, it turns out, dating all the way back to Beowulf, who used it to describe the color of horses. The color “sepia,” I learned, is derived from the ink of the cuttlefish and was favored by the poet Marcus Valerius Martialis, a man who trolled his fellow writers in sepia-tinted handwriting: “‘Write shorter epigrams’ is your advice./Yet you write nothing, Velox. How concise!”
St. Claire fell in love with the subject of color while researching a book about fashion in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where she found descriptions of textiles as “mouthwatering and bewildering as the tasting menu of a Michelin-starred restaurant.” This led to a running column for the magazine, British Elle Decoration. The Secret Lives of Color is those essays brought together in a book that captures the stories behind 75 shades, dyes, and hues. It also uses these colors as accents, to spectacular effect, in the table of contents, section headings, and even the index.
“Scheele’s Green” is the hue that most closely matches the current view from my window. I know that green is the color of good land that can grow food, but the fecundity of New England can feel airless to this child of the arid Rockies. This year, the viridian sod of my lawn is even more springy and thick than usual. It was the pride of the previous owners, carefully cultivated out of a diabolically greening mix of chemicals and designer grass seed.
When Carl Wilhelm Scheele made a new, bright green from copper arsenite in 1775, it was an instant success, finding its way into fabrics and wallpapers, artificial flowers, papers, and even as a tint for confectionery. Charles Dickens, St. Claire tells us, considered redecorating his whole house in Scheele’s Green, but was dissuaded by his wife, which was lucky, since the color was deadly. One doctor, on testing “some muslin of a very beautiful pale green,” found that it contained over 60 grains of an arsenic compound in every yard.
From the beginning, I have tried to mute the lawn's loud, boorish green. I dug holes and planted them with apple trees and raspberry bushes. I dumped many cubic feet of good brown earth into raised garden beds. I tripled the size of my perennial garden, cultivating clusters of white, yellow, and magenta peonies and bottle blue thistles, and letting yellow coreopsis, dusky Russian sage, and pale pink speedwell spread wherever they wanted to go.
I am not a good gardener: I pruned the bright blue hydrangeas to death and can’t get the silvery artemisia to spread. I don’t intrinsically like being amongst plants—it is itchy and frustrating work. But, as soon as the rains stopped, I was back outside, ripping out handfuls of green and staking sodden blooms, making space and light for more color.
Courtney Cook is a writer who works in a technology company. She lives in Wilder, VT and publishes the weekly newsletter, "Survival by Book," at courtneycook.substack.com.