Pleasant Hill Moss

From the French plaisant, pleasing — used as a color modifier since the fifteenth century for hues that read as agreeable, the kind of color that wears well over a long viewing without becoming demanding or fatiguing. Pleasant green, pleasant rose: moderate saturation combined with optical comfort. Sits at the crisp-bucket alongside easy and calm.

Old English hyll, natural elevation. As a color modifier, hill implies a rolling-rise-and-pasture quality, the visual register of South-Downs-and-Cotswolds rolling chalk-and-limestone hill-pasture-and-sheep-grazed open surfaces under broad rolling-hill English-pastoral sky. Sits at the modifier-and-place end of the grid, parallel to dale and bluff 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.