Shades of chlorophyll green

Green is the colour of primary production by plants, and hence also the primary colour of camouflage for animals. Emissions of the green, blue and red colour primaries will combine additively to project a full spectrum of hues. Federico García Lorca’s poetic imagery radiates lush and cryptic greens, mixed with sea-blue and blood-red in his 1928 Romance Sonámbulo (Dreamwalking Ballad)1.

• García Lorca himself came to a bloody end at the age of 38, eight years after the publication to immediate popular acclaim of his collection Romancero Gitano, including Romance Sonámbulo. The rising fascist movement led by Francisco Franco had denounced him for his outspoken socialist views, despite his association with both sides of the political divide. He fled into hiding at the house of a friend, where Franco’s forces soon found and arrested him. A week later, beside a winding mountain road on 19ᵗʰ August 1936, they summarily executed García Lorca and three others. Their remains were never recovered, as he had foreseen might happen.
  
  I knew they had murdered me.
  They combed the cafés, graveyards, and churches for me,
  pried open casks and cabinets,
  destroyed three skeletons in order to rip out their gold teeth.
  But they couldn’t find me anymore.
  They couldn’t?
  No, they couldn’t find me.
  From the final stanza of García Lorca’s The Fable of Three Friends (unpublished in his lifetime, translated from Spanish by Greg Simon and Steven White).

C.P. Doncaster, Timeline of the Human Condition, star index