GREEN IS THE COLOR OF GROWTH

Rex Burress

Even though most people go to Table Mountain in the springtime to see the color of flowers, green is the dominant feature of the living vegetation, especially revealed in the grasses and leaves.

It's that chlorophyll connection with sun, soil, and water that gives new life to an otherwise drab planet. The green and gold of California fields has largely been brown in our drought years, and even though Henry David Thoreau declared: “Brown is the color for me, the color of our coats and our daily lives, the color of the poor man's loaf,” he did say that “Green is essentially vivid, or the color of life, and it is therefore most brilliant when a plant is moist or most alive.”

It is always thrilling to see the moss on the rocks around the Feather River Nature Center turn from summer brownness to a rich green with the arrival of the first rains of fall. Some rare mosses were initially the reason the CA Wildlife Conservation Dept purchased the 3,500 acres of Table Mountain mesa, but the public is also pleased to have access to the flower display. One year access was cut off by the landowners when fences were cut. Cattle continue to have grazing rights during the grass-growing season, but apparently flowers and cows can co-exist, as well as waterfall watchers, petal patrollers, dog dashes, and kite flyers.

Sharing the mesa with the flora are not only people and their possessions, but newts, fence lizards, horned lizards, snakes, coyotes, gophers, meadowlarks, blackbirds, lark sparrows, and bluebirds that are just a few of what I've seen up on top. We call it a community working together, and animals could not live without plants, even if you're not a vegetarian!

Unlike the deep freezes of Missouri, the Midwest, and Eastern U.S.A., where green becomes scarce in the winter other than Christmas conifers being hauled to homes, the less frigid landscape around Oroville, CA., features green grass all winter. Nevertheless, a majority of the trees--the native blue oaks, black oaks, valley oaks, cottonwood, and willow--are deciduous and drop their leaves in fall, as those who watch the river well know. Live oaks and introduced eucalyptus retain their greenery.

Feather River petal peepers eagerly watch for 'the return of the manroot' along about January; one of the first herbaceous plants to grow leaf and flower. There is a prominent manroot wild cucumber [Marah fabaceus] that grows beside the Sewim-bo trail near Oroville's nature center. The snaky vines crawl out of the ground and go clambering through buckbrush as if eager to reach the sun. Groping tendrils, fresh greenness, and a sprinkling of white blossoms leads the way. The prickly round fruit is suddenly thrust forth even before the poppies bloom.

In the same area, another early arrival plays hide and seek with the shrubs—the pipevine—even though its pipe-shaped blossom appears before the leaves. Soon the pipevine butterfly chrysalis splits and a new adult emerges. Soon, it is sipping nectar from the flowers but lays its eggs on the pipevine leaves where the cycle continues. Green is the color for me!

“Light again, leaf again, green again, life again, love again, song again, nest again, young again...”

--Alfred Lord Tennyson

“...We must live through the dreary winter/If we are to value the spring,/And the woods must be cold and silent,/Before the robins sing. / The flowers must be buried in darkness/Before they can bud and bloom,/And the sweetest, warmest sunshine/Comes after the storm and the gloom...”

A Tribute to Grass

“...Grass is the forgiveness of nature, her constant benediction. Fields trampled with battle, saturated with blood, torn with the ruts of cannon, grow green again with grass and carnage is forgotten...”

--John James Ingalls (1833-1900)