Thinking green

Although the Pantone Color of the Year for 2020 is blue, green is what has really been on our minds for the past few weeks. After experiencing record low temperatures through the middle of May, summer seemed to explode onto the scene overnight, bringing with it 80 degree days and lush vegetative growth. It’s as if we looked up one day and all the trees had turned green overnight. Some of the plants here put on inches of growth over the course of Memorial Day weekend alone. The ferns that had all died back from the frost became lush and green again, the hostas we planted in April have unfurled, and the Arrowwood Viburnum went from just emerging to fully leafed out. Green is so ubiquitous that it can be underappreciated or seen only as a backdrop for blooming flowers. But what other color symbolizes growth and new beginnings the way that green does? And what other color enhances the many different textures of foliage?

This has been the busiest spring we have every experienced here, and the added pressures of Covid-19 have made it the most stressful and uncertain spring in memory. It can be easy to get so caught up in the chaos of it all that you lose touch with what is going on around you, but we have tried to make time every now and then to stop and look around us. And that has helped us to appreciate the fact that we have chosen to be in the green industry.

“Greenery” was 2017 color of the year, and the Pantone Institute described it as “nature’s neutral” and said “the more submerged people are in modern life, the greater their innate craving to immerse themselves in the physical beauty and inherent unity of the natural world”. What better way to describe our current environment? One of the good things to come from everything going on in the world right now is that people have a heightened appreciation for the outdoors. Will this appreciation last when everything goes back to normal and we can all resume our normal social activities? We think so, because in difficult times, people will always be able to find comfort in the natural world.