While I was writing my series of articles on color for Pacific Horticulture over the past few years, I was also taking lots of pictures of willows, like the one above that appeared in my photography shows at Studio-e Gallery and Museum Quality Framing. I received many compliments on my photos. But one back-handed slight stuck with me the most.

“I like the cheery on with all the color,” is what one of the viewers said of the collection.

Cheery is not a word I would use to compliment, seems dismissive.

But it gave me a lot to chew on.

We associate drabness, colorlessness with the negative emotions. Only color is happy, lively and vital.

But if you look into this photo, you will see one seed being released. It is a portrait of a birth, a beginning. I rotated this thought and image in my mind. Why the nesting female birds are also very drab. Deliberately drab!

Is there a fecundity to drabness we are missing?

Dull as dirt?

The recent swatch of dramatic floods which raced through the valley, left as much behind as they took away. Great smears of silt on the road make it difficult to drive. But it is that grimy, gray slurry that makes these soils rich, the summer so resplendent.

And it is the grimy light this time of year that seems to show me what light is really like.

Certainly we put up multi-colored lights on our house, to ward off the evil spirits of winter boredom. But nothing struck me with such a deep sense of beauty as this little post-diluvium scene on our country road. The way the light skipped across the dull pond waters.

Once again if sunflowers were blooming, my eye would track towards the color, miss the sublimity. I love the stripped down colorless landscapes of winter. No snow even to cheer it all up with whiteness.

It is my antidote to the world of commerce abuzz with color this time of year.

But antidotes are meant to be taken in small doses. And my heart leapt the other day, when I saw the first red bud of my hellebore swelling.

Yet, I was still captivated by this single willow leaf glued by silt to the road, soon to be ground by tires into a fine humus for worms and plants to feed on.