Not only the grass but the pines also were greener yesterday for being wet. To-day, the grass being dry, the green blades are less conspicuous than yesterday. It would seem, then, that this color is more vivid when wet, and perhaps all green plants, like lichens, are to some extent greener in moist weather.
Green is essentially vivid, or the color of life, and it is therefore most brilliant when a plant is moist or most alive. A plant is said to be green in opposition to being withered and dead. The word, according to Webster, is from the Saxon grene, to grow, and hence is the color of herbage when growing.
High winds all night, rocking the house, opening doors, etc. To-day also. It is wintry cold also, and ice has formed nearly an inch thick in my boat.
P. M. — Down the river-bank.
The wind is still very strong and cold from the north west, filling the air with dust and blowing the water, which has slightly risen, over the rocks and bushes along the shore, where it freezes in the shape of bulls’ horns about the osiers, making coarse rakes with its dependent icicles when the osiers are horizontal, also turtle-shells over the rocks.
It is just such a wind and freezing as that of last March (18th, I think), and, if the meadow were flooded, there would probably be as much ice as then on the bushes. There may be wind enough for this phenomenon in the winter, but then there is no open water to be blown.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 2, 1855
Not only the grass but the pines also were greener yesterday for being wet. See April 1, 1855 ("When I look out the window I see that the grass on the bank on the south side of the house is already much greener than it was yesterday."); March 30, 1855 ("There is a very perceptible greenness on our south bank now"). See also December 28, 1851 ("The white pines look greener than usual in this gentle rain,"); May 11, 1854 ("Not only the wet grass looks many shades greener in the twilight, but the old pine-needles also.")
Green is essentially vivid, or the color of life, and it is therefore most brilliant when a plant is moist or most alive. See April 24, 1859 ("I am struck by the vivid greenness of the tips of the sedge just pushing up out of its dry tussocks in the water . . . this vivid green . . . is the renewal of life."); October 12, 1859 ("The dendroideum and lucidulum, etc., — how vivid a green ! — lifting their heads above the moist fallen leaves.")
High winds all night, rocking the house, opening doors. See February 29, 1852 (“High winds . . . The house shakes, and the beds and tables rock.”); March 6, 1855 (" Still stronger wind, shaking the house."); March 18, 1854 ("Very high wind this forenoon . . . Never felt it shake the house so much."); June 2, 1855 (“The wind shakes the house night and day.”)
April 3. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, April 2
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau
It is wintry cold
and ice has formed in my boat –
nearly an inch thick.
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, High winds and wintry cold.
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau
"A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality.”
~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2025
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