Warm Cape Moss

Old English wearm, of moderate heat — used as a color modifier since the medieval period for hues that read as containing red, orange, or yellow undertones. Warm gray, warm white: not necessarily a temperature, but the optical impression of a slight red-orange shift. Sits across the crisp and neutral buckets.

Latin cappa, hooded-cloak. As a color modifier, cape implies a hooded-cloak-and-shoulder-cape quality, the visual register of Spanish-capa-and-Italian-cappa-magna hand-hooded-cloak-and-shoulder-cape Spanish-capa-and-Italian-cappa-magna-and-Portuguese-capa cape-and-hooded-cloak-and-shoulder-cape surfaces under Spanish-capa-and-Italian-cappa-magna-and-Portuguese-capa Iberian-and-Italian-Renaissance Iberian-cape-light. Sits at the modifier-and-textile end of the grid, parallel to cloak and cope in usage.

Bryophyta — the nonvascular plants that colonized land 470 million years ago, before vascular plants and far before flowers. The color refers to a thick mat of Hypnum or sphagnum on a temperate forest floor: a soft, slightly yellow-shifted green with the velvet texture of millimeter-scale leaves. Dustier than fern, deeper than lichen, with the slow patience of a plant that lives by absorbing rain through its surface.