It’s June. The lupine moth is mint green. The vibrant hostas outside the patio doors are pea green. The bracken ferns along the trail are bright yellowish green. Green, green, and more green.
Greenness flows in waves and rows, across yards and to the forests and fields, to the trails and meadows. The forces and rhythms of nature’s rebirth stretch green to infinity. In my field of vision, green comes in all shades distinguishable; the human eye is said to pick up only 40 hues of green even though there are thousands or even infinite shades of the color.
I like how green streams through June, how it runs from the lawn to the meadow, to the rows of corn leading one’s eyes to the leafed-out woods. The color flows like verses in a poem, connected in visual rhyme, one purpose in time, leading spring into summer. I’m filled with the bloom of June.
The month glistens, wrote the poet James Russell Lowell. “And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, comes perfect days. Whether we look, or whether we listen, we hear the murmur, or see it glisten.”
In his “Succession of Four Sweet Months, Robert Herrick penned of June, “Next enters June, and brings us more gems than those two that went before.”
Gems indeed, on days so full that darkness defers for a time to the beauty. There are gems of campion and geraniums, their whites and purples dotting the greenness. Of daisy fleabane and wild roses, their yellows and reds dancing on a stage of green.
The fullness of June is breathtaking. I stare in awe, as well I should, as William H. Davies implored us to in “Leisure.” Davies penned, “What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare? No time to turn to Beauty’s glance, and watch her feet, how they can dance. A poor life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.”
Note: Want to read more nature essays such as this? My new book, “Soul of the Outdoors,” is available through online book sellers and at Wisconsin bookstores in Rice Lake (Old Bookshop), Eau Claire (Dotters), Spooner (Northwinds), and Bayfield (Honest Dog), and at Bookstore at Fitger’s in Duluth, Minn.
