WordWealth: verdant

ver·dant , adj.

Drab in winter, then suddenly sodden with alpine runoff, the region turns dazzlingly verdant in spring.—— Patricia Albers, Shadows, Fire, Snow

Dry as the region just outside the delta may be, it would still be covered with grasses, yellowish in the dry season, verdant in the wet.—— Niles Eldredge, Life in the Balance

We took our glasses to the verdant back yard. Boyce and Janet had a triple-depth lot -- 150 feet of Palo Alto crust in which Boyce had laid drip-irrigation lines, so that now it looked like the Garden of Eden back there. Lemons and limes and oranges hung over our heads at the round terrace table. Zippy the hummingbird was doing his air-and-space show, flashing in from nowhere to sip at his feeder, and then buzzing our heads before zinging back to the treetop where he lived. The little nugget of his beelike body stood in relief against the sky, microscopic stud on a eucalyptus branch. —— Ralph Lombreglia; Somebody Up There Likes Me; The Atlantic; Dec 1994

I was verdant enough to think her Agrippine very fine. —— Henry James, "The Théâtre Français"

Origin:

Verdant comes from French verdoyant, present participle of verdoyer, "to be verdant, to grow green," from Old French verdoier, verdeier, from verd, vert, "green," from Latin viridis, "green," from virere, "to be green."