By: Blonde Two

Please don’t get over excited dear Blondees and Bondettes.  This post is not an account of my the more erotic side of my Dartmoor adventures.  I would like to tell you that this is because those adventures are private but in reality, there isn’t an erotic side to my Dartmoor adventures.  Anyone who has worn three pairs of trousers all day, not showered for 72 hours or ever had to get out of a warm sleeping bag will understand why this is (or isn’t).

Once, when waiting for a party of students at Higher White Tor, I started to count the number of different lichen and moss living on a square metre of rock.  Now if this sounds like a rather eccentric pastime to you, you would probably be right but there are only so many ways of entertaining yourself sitting on a lump of granite, in the rain, on Dartmoor and we had already played our traditional Higher White game of “Would you or wouldn’t you?” (I am not going to explain this game, you will understand if you have played it).

Anyway, on Saturday, I found myself sitting on Corndon Tor (some of the best 360 views of Dartmoor) and doing a similar thing – except that this time I was counting the different shades of green in a 200mish squarish (estimations correct at time of going to press).  The difference was that with the lichen, I found a finite number, I think it was around 11.  With the shades of green, it was impossible to count – there seemed to be no thing that was the same shade as the other.  Light played on similar shades making them very different to each other and the clouds scudding (fab word) across the sky dropped an eau-de-nil (pale green) to a dull chrysochlorus (green gold) or even a deep corbeau (blackish green).

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I don’t know if it is the same where you live, but this year, Devon seems to have gone virescent (green) in a rather over the top “look at me” sort of way.  Kind of like a jack-in-the-box who has been kept penned in too long.  Everywhere you look, there is green – you can’t escape it and once the sun shines (which it occasionally does) you feel like you are enveloped in a huge smaragdine (emerald green) sleeping bag.  All the greens have arrived at once this year, there is caesious (grey green – for duller days), celadon (pale green – for the sensitive), chartreuse (yellowish green – for the queasy), lovat (blue green – for the sad), porraceous (leek green – for the Welsh), tilleul (yellowish green – if you still feel queasy), viridian (chrome green – for cooking?) and zinnober (my personal favourite but also chrome green).  Why chrome green needs two words when it seems like an impossible colour is beyond me but you can guarantee that Devon has had it in both forms this year.

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So green is the new grey and probably has lots more shades than 50.  An amazing colour, my favourite way to observe it is lying on my back, looking at a blue sky through new spring leaves.