The instinct when painting in green landscapes is to reach for tubes labelled sap green, hooker’s green, olive green. It is understandable, the names correspond to things you can see. The difficulty is that pre-mixed greens often lack the internal complexity that makes a painted woodland feel real. They tend to sit flat. Mixed greens, built from the pigments on your palette, carry the character of two or three separate pigments in tension, and that tension is what gives a green life.
The seven pigments
The palette described here has evolved across a lot of tree-and-undergrowth work, and it is deliberately small.
French ultramarine and cerulean blue cover two ends of the blue spectrum. Ultramarine is warm and granulating, useful for shadows and deep water. Cerulean is cooler and clean, the engine of clear sky greens when mixed with yellow.
For yellows: a transparent yellow such as nickel azo or hansa yellow medium, and raw sienna. The transparent yellow mixes clear, bright greens. Raw sienna leans into the autumnal, the dappled, the ochre edge of afternoon light.
Burnt umber handles bark, soil, and the deep neutrals you need to push greens forward by contrast.
A single red, quinacridone rose or a cool permanent red, completes the palette. It earns its place by mixing earthy neutrals and by providing the occasional warm note that makes a painting feel less uniform.
Why limitation helps
Seven pigments. Every green from acid to near-black. Every shadow from blue-grey to warm brown. The limitation is not a constraint, it is a coherence. A painting made from the same small set of pigments has a unity that is difficult to achieve when you are reaching across a full range of tubes. The colours in a limited palette relate to one another by design, and the viewer feels that relationship even if they cannot name it.