The ancient origins of the colour green
Western societies took longer to embrace the beauty of nature, and by extension, green. But by the second half of the Middle Ages, European writers were infusing the colour with their new-found faith in the landscape, connecting it to fertility, growth, spring, hope and joy. In one 15th-Century text, the French herald Jean Courtois couldn’t contain his enthusiasm for the colour of chlorophyll: “There is nothing in the world more pleasant than the beautiful verdure of fields in blossom, broad-leafed trees covered in foliage, banks of the rivers where the swallows come and bathe, stones that are green in colour, like precious emeralds,” he wrote. “What is it that makes April and May the most pleasant months of the year? It is the verdure of the fields, which prompts the small birds to sing and to praise spring and its delightful gay green livery.”
By the end of the 17th Century, English poets were beginning to realise, as we do today, that green spaces can be profoundly therapeutic. Andrew Marvell’s much-loved poem The Garden is a hymn to the curative capacities of the colour. “No white nor red was ever seen so amorous as this lovely green,” he wrote. Marvell went on to describe his imagined garden as a place of peace and escapism – one that can replace our worldly worries with, as he so memorably put it, a “green thought in a green shade”.
New beginnings?
In recent years – and particularly now, as COP26 unfolds in Glasgow – most of our “green thoughts” are tainted with fears of ecological disaster. Since that raucous meeting in Vancouver in early 1970, the colour has become the official label of the environmental movement. There are now more than a hundred recognised “Green” parties around the world, which have together turned the colour into a defining ideology of our times, comparable in some ways to “conservatism”, “socialism” or “liberalism”. Green is no longer just a hue; it has become a political agenda, a way of life.
Cultural figures have spearheaded this movement from the start. The artist Joseph Beuys helped found the world’s first national “Green Party”, die Grünen, in Germany in January 1980, and played a major role in physically greening the world, planting 7,000 oak trees around the German city of Kassel from 1982. The British artist David Nash has spent the last four decades making plant-based sculptures in North Wales. Ash Dome, a circular vaulted space made from 22 carefully trained ash trees, has been growing since 1977. It was initially conceived as an act of ecological optimism. “We were killing the planet,” Nash has recalled. “Ash Dome was a long-term commitment, an act of faith”.
