Green

Green is a fascinating colour. An absolute colour. It cannot be intensified. You cannot say green, greener, greenest. That doesn’t exist. And yet there are a thousand different greens. There are blue, gray, and yellow greens. There are dark and light greens. Yes, there are even sad and happy greens and everything in between. Green can be shiny or matte, shy or obtrusive, loud or quiet. Oh, there are more than a thousand greens. That’s why it’s also my favourite color. I could talk for pages about the different greens, about the hopeful, promising spring green, the lush, life-affirming summer green, the somewhat dusty, red-tinged autumn green, and the gloomy yet comforting winter green. Maybe I will do it sometime. But today I want to talk about a bright, rich, laughing green, the green of the lesser celandine.

I was quite young. A boy, about twelve years old, when the green of a lush carpet of lesser celandine first captivated me. It was in the north of Hamburg, on the upper reaches of the Alster in a riverside forest. The Alster, unlike the Elbe, is only a small river, but it flows right through this large, beautiful city from the north, dividing it into an eastern and a western half, and further down, near the city center, it widens into a large, two-part lake, the Outer and Inner Alster. Our ancestors did that. They dammed the Alster to operate a mill with its water. The mill is long gone, but the two lakes have remained, two shiny giant mirrors in the middle of a big city. They make Hamburg so beautiful.

In the upper area, the Alster is just a small river, about ten meters wide and quite modest and demure. Now and then, a small stream from the meadows or the adjacent forest joins it, making the river more lush and powerful. And on such a stream, a whole carpet of lesser celandine had settled. The strong leaves shone like varnish in the sun, which penetrated abundantly through the still bare trees and shrubs. It was a juicy green, full of strength. A bit obtrusive, perhaps even presumptuous, as it encircled the thin trickle of the stream. On some leaves, which were slightly slanted, the sun sparkled, and the leaf edges were framed in silver. And the most beautiful thing was, above all this cheeky green, thousands of thick, bright stars shone, also glossy and incredibly yellow. There I stood, amazed, unable to get enough of this wonder “green.” But then the gardener’s heart and the greed for possession awoke in me. I absolutely wanted to have something like this in my little “children’s” garden. Greed is perhaps an ugly word, and I shouldn’t really use it, but I can’t think of anything better that hits the nail on the head. So I stepped boldly and carelessly into this green carpet — and immediately got a wet foot. Yes, that’s what happens when you’re too greedy and throw all caution to the wind. I sank into the soft, wet, brightly green-edged mire up to my ankle. With a jerk, I wanted to jump to the side into the dry. But then my shoe got stuck too. Considering that this all happened in 1942, in the middle of World War II, you can imagine what it meant to lose a shoe. So it had to come out of the mire, no question, and that was quite a mess. But I managed it. I got the shoe back, washed it clean in the stream, and also largely removed all traces from my clothes. And I took a few lesser celandine plants with me. However, they dried up during my forty-five-minute bike ride from the Upper Alster to my house. It was quite warm, despite the early time of year, and there were no plastic bags yet.

For a few years, I forgot about the lesser celandine. The end of the war. The worry about daily bread, firewood, clothing, and the future pushed everything aside. Only as an almost adult did the lesser celandine with its sparkling green come back to my mind. It was almost in the same place. And then I finally took something home to my garden, nicely packed in moist moss and wrapped in grass, because there were still no plastic bags.

I had neither a stream nor a swamp in my garden, so I planted the three plants with their tuberous roots in my rock garden. That’s what an alpine garden was called back then. Just next to a larger stone. Not directly in the sun, somewhat shady, but still quite dry. And there the three plants languished for a few years. The green was yellow and miserable. Not nice at all. Soon the three disappeared, and I forgot about the lesser celandine again.

Until I got my own garden and built a stream in it, sealed in my dry sandy soil with plastic sheeting, because that was available by then. And on the bank of this small stream, in the moist, fertile loam, I planted a few lesser celandines. Yes, and then came the rude awakening.

Lesser celandine has an enormous vitality and an incredible urge to spread. It takes every opportunity to multiply, as long as the conditions are even remotely right. Soon I had not only by the stream but in many places in the garden the beautiful, rich green carpet of lesser celandine with the sparkling, golden stars, and I no longer found it so beautiful. Almost everything else was drowning in it. But what can you do? I won’t get rid of the stuff again, and sometimes in some places in the garden, I don’t find the whole affair so bad after all. By now, I have my lesser celandine pretty much under control and can even almost enjoy it again. Especially because our native, yellow fellow has differently colored relatives.

The first different one was one with thick, somewhat marbled leaves and almost white, huge flower wheels for a lesser celandine. It’s called Salmon’s White because it comes from England. And it was expensive. I never thought I would pay about fifteen marks for a lesser celandine. Anyone who would have predicted that, I would have surely laughed at. Eventually, I got two with double flowers, the yellow double was not too expensive, the other, white, slightly greenish double I even got for free. My favorite is the Colarette variety with copper-brown flowers. Yes, the flower color now ranges from almost white to brown-yellow, and the leaves are no longer purely green for all of them. There are yellowish and brownish marbled ones. A year ago, a young gardening friend gave me a lesser celandine that even has red-brown-green leaves, almost like a copper beech. But honestly, with all seriousness, none of the new English lesser celandines can create such a rich, lush, yellow-starred green as the “wild,” simple, native lesser celandine.