At this point in the winter, it isn’t so much the flowers that I miss but the green! I buy cheap cut flowers regularly at the grocery store to brighten my dining room table. But outdoors the landscape has alternated between brown and white for months and it feels monotonous. I long to see green.
There are some evergreen shrubs and perennials in my yard and around my neighborhood in Denver, but no great expanses of green lawn, or moss, such as those I remember from my childhood in the Pacific Northwest. This time of year all the lawns are brown (except those neighbors who have installed artificial turf, that’s a topic for another blog).
This week we had several gray days, where even the evergreens seemed muted. I took pictures in the park near my home and even though they were color photos, they looked like black-and-white shots. The green had faded into gray even in the daytime. (See below, same tree, a couple of days apart.)
Recently a friend of mine posted on Facebook asking for feedback on some paint chips for her living room. They were green – I wanted to shout “YES! Paint your walls green.” I have had shades of green in my living room and dining room for almost 10 years and I love the palette. The walls look great with my collection of glass floats from the Pacific beaches, collected years ago by my husband and his family.
Green. The color of life, hope, spring, all things not-winter.
Intellectually, I know that green is coming soon. While the February snows might melt into brown lawns, the March snows usually result in a slow-but-steady greening. Some years the green comes sooner than others, and it can be short-lived if we have a warm, dry spring. But there are green moments coming, I am sure of it when I look at the calendar. Sometimes I am less sure when I look out the window, or at the paths I walk around my neighborhood.
Today it started snowing in the late afternoon, and I took my walk in the snow, watching the white flakes cover the brown park near my home. I wondered, is this the snow that will melt into greening grass? Or the next one? Or the next one?
Such is the nature of life in the garden. The brown and white season is followed by a green season. It always has, and I have hope that it always will. But still I wait and watch, alternating between discouragement and expectancy. And in my February longing for color, I look more closely at the lawn every day. How many days until green?
Flowers For Your Soul 
Something we lack here are the seasonal changes. We get the weather like everyone else, but redwoods do not change much, sort of like the firs and red cedars of the Pacific Northwest, but without the snow.
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