There’s Treasure Everywhere!

I love gardening. As someone who doesn’t own property, I have always been grateful for access to land to cultivate a garden, whether it was a town community garden plot or space on a farm owned or managed by a generous neighbor. There’s nothing quite as grounding or satisfying as getting my hands in the dirt and tending plants.

However, gardening can be full of frustration and disappointment. It can be exhausting. One’s labors can be many and one’s successes few.

Gardening dye plants comes with a particular irony for me. You can’t eat them. They are not, strictly speaking, necessary. One can certainly live without dye plants. Why go to all that trouble?

I started writing this post in the summer of 2020. We had a dry spring. We had a dry summer. As of May 2020 our part of the state was under “significant” drought conditions, which persisted through the fall. We were lucky never to get to the “critical” level that other parts of the state faced. You can check out the map of drought conditions in Massachusetts here, with updates posted throughout the summer and fall. I spent a ridiculous number of hours hauling gallons of water via car, which comes with a fossil fuel burden, trying to keep a couple beds of woad alive. I gave up entirely on the bed of flax I planted in April.

Honestly, why bother?

I know why I love making dyes with plants. Color is beautiful and beauty makes me happy. To be able to participate in this process of beauty-making helps me feel connected to, and part of, the many incredible forms of life on this planet. Creating color feels magical and meaningful. It is mind-boggling and humbling that plants can give these colors to us, over and above all the other gifts that plants bestow. Medicine, food, fragrance…. Oxygen alone would be enough!  I am deeply grateful to plants for all their lessons and awe-inspiring power. “Hey, need some color to brighten your day? Let me help you with that.”

But sometimes I look at all the abundant color that grows freely, of its own accord, with no effort expended on my part, in the fields and roadsides all around me, and wonder why I work so hard to maintain a dye plant garden. July and August (when I first started writing this post) are especially good times to reflect upon the abundance and take stock. There’s treasure everywhere (to quote a beloved line from Calvin and Hobbes).

Calvin and Hobbes There's Treasure Everywhere

It’s the middle of winter now. Gardeners are planning gardens and ordering seeds, or feeling glad for seeds saved. What to devote garden space to, and what to gather by the wayside?

Here are a few of the most prolific dye plants in my neighborhood, photographed in June, July, and August of 2020. I will save a discussion of the use and implication of terms such as invasive, noxious, and opportunistic for another day. Hopefully “introduced” or “naturalized” are accurate enough for now.

Queen Anne’s lace (Daucus carota) is an introduced species from Europe that can be found everywhere. It makes a lovely cool, clear yellow. It readily fills in marginal spaces along the side of the road, next to railroad tracks, and under power and utility lines.

It also fills in fields and open places. It is so prolific that I usually use just the flowers for dyeing, but I suspect the foliage gives similar colors. Also, it smells delicious when the dye bath is heating up!

 

Next up, tansy (Tanacetum vulgare). It is also introduced from Europe. It is also quite aggressive. It is another source of yellow, albeit stinkier. It’s more on the gold side of yellow, a bit more brassy or brown than Queen Anne’s lace.

Purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) is yet another introduced species from Europe. It is especially known (and lamented) for displacing native wetland plants in New England, but can also be found in drier habitats along the side of the road or underneath power lines. Whatever else one may wish to say about purple loosestrife, it is stunningly beautiful and makes bees very happy.

 

Purple loosestrife can make a variety of colors ranging from tan to olive green to gray, with the use of iron. I have even read a recipe for making black, but the amount of iron and heat called for seem overly harsh for wool. I feel like it has a lot of potential as a tannin source, and I haven’t explored it nearly enough.

Also visible above is jewelweed (Impatiens capensis) which is a native species here in New England. I have never used it for dyeing. I have heard from other dyers that it makes a rich yellow or gold. Personally, if I’m gathering rather than cultivating, I tend to stick with dye plants that are generally agreed to be *too* abundant. If I’m going to use a native species, I feel that it, too, ought to be unquestionably abundant. While jewelweed is not at risk or endangered here in Massachusetts, I don’t tend to find it in wide swaths, so thus far I have left it alone.

A native plant here in New England that I feel totally fine using is goldenrod. There are several species, and I’m sorry to say that I can’t identify them all, so maybe I shouldn’t be so cavalier. The type I’ve used is Solidago canadensis, I believe, though I am not positive that I can tell it apart from Solidago odora or sweet goldenrod. Yes, it makes yellow. A cheery, intense yellow. I think it’s the most vivid when you pick the flowering tops just before they are starting to bloom, when the buds are still pretty tight and the overall color is a neon greenish-yellow. In this photo it is a modest presence amidst a collection of other plants, but you can often see it filling whole fields around here.

For now, I think I’ll wrap things up with black walnut (Juglans nigra). The green hulls from the nuts of these tall, lovely trees are a rich source of brown. Last year was actually not an abundant year for black walnuts. These were some early drops in August, and after that I didn’t find many mature nuts. Maybe it was the drought or maybe just not a mast year for black walnuts.

In a more abundant year, I can easily collect a five gallon bucket full from underneath just one tree.

To get the most intense color from black walnut hulls, you have to pick them up promptly and use them while the hulls are still green. They also smell wonderfully fragrant at this stage. If they sit on the ground too long, they start to get soft and black, and teeny little maggots start to grow. I believe that these are either walnut husk flies or walnut husk maggots, but I need to read up more about them. I find them squirmy and off-putting, but I’m sure they have their own lives to live and jobs to do on this earth, so I feel kind of bad boiling them to death.

As Calvin gleefully notes above, one of the treasures that are everywhere are disgusting grubs!

Green Yarn

This has been an extremely prolific year for Queen Anne’s Lace, also known as wild carrot or Daucus carota. It is absolutely everywhere!

Back in July I ran two dyebaths with fresh Queen Anne’s Lace flowers. Since it’s so abundant, I decided to just use the flowers this time, though you can use the whole plant. For the first dyebath, I had no trouble collecting 30 oz. of flowers from various spots around Amherst, including the sides of parking lots, the side of the road, and next to bus stops.

The flowers are incredibly fragrant and sticky, and consequently they host a huge range of insects. When you pick the flowers, all the insects come along, too. This fact gave rise to a new house-hold rule:

I weighed the plant material outdoors! I also made the first dyebath outside on the portable electric stove outdoors. We had some rainy weather after that, so I made the second dyebath indoors using 24 oz. of flowers that I picked in Hadley. Continue reading “Green Yarn”

Swamp Milkweed Sightings

I first learned to identify swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) in 2012 after discovering some lovely fibers near my sister’s apartment in Maryland. In 2015 I acquired some plants from Nasami Farm in Whately, MA for the Common School‘s fiber and dye plant garden at Bramble Hill Farm. For all this time, I have been keeping an eye out for it “in the wild” but haven’t seen it. Until now!

This month I have been spotting swamp milkweed all over the place. The first place I noticed it was in the bluebird field at Amherst College on July 6th. Admittedly, these photos are a bit like photos of Big Foot: blurry and indistinct. Trust me, though, it is swamp milkweed!

The next place I caught a sighting was in the Lawrence Swamp area of the Norwottuck Rail Trail in Amherst. It was right in the swamp, aptly. We could see several plants further out, but ran into the same blurry Big Foot photo problem. This one was close to the edge of the trail:

Continue reading “Swamp Milkweed Sightings”

Apocynum cannabinum on the Hadley Dike

In my Fiber Fiber Everywhere post back in April, I noted that there are fiber plants all over the place where I live in Western Massachusetts. Recently I noticed a new one!

On June 26th, while walking along the dike in Hadley, I noticed a potential fiber plant that I had never noticed there before. I am pretty sure it’s Apocynum cannabinum, sometimes called common dogbane, hemp dogbane, or Indian hemp. The UMass Extension website has some helpful information for identification here. If I turn out to be wrong I will let you know. It is possible that some of the fibers I’ve seen on the trail by the river are from old dogbane stalks, and I just never realized it before.

Here’s a view of the whole plant in situ:

The flowers are white:

Continue reading “Apocynum cannabinum on the Hadley Dike”

Fiber Fiber Everywhere

When I’m describing the steps involved in extracting fiber from a fiber-plant such as flax, people often ask, “How on earth did anyone ever figure that out?” I have thought about this question a lot. I have many ideas about it. Some can be backed up with references and citations, and some are just hunches based on my personal experience.

I believe that we humans come from a long line of brilliant thinkers and observers, experimenters and creators. The human use of flax fibers in Europe dates to at least 34,000 years ago. Humans and our human-like relatives and ancestors have been really smart and really creative for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years. Furthermore, primates in general are really smart, so I am happily willing to accept any kind of habitat-modifying, tool-using, culture-teaching behaviors dating back 2 or 3 million years, at least. Which is all very deep. It is admittedly hard to have a clear mental picture of what life might have felt like for a hominid so long ago. Continue reading “Fiber Fiber Everywhere”

Black Walnut Ink

Over the past few weeks in my class at school, we have been making black walnut ink. It is one of the craft and science projects we’re doing as part of our study of Colonial New England. We plan to use the ink to write with quill pens in pamphlet-stitch-bound “copy books” to scribe historical aphorisms such as “Mind your book,” “Strive to learn,” “Call no ill names,” and “Cheat not in your play”. Yes, OK, these are pretty moralistic, but speaking as a primary school teacher, I actually think they are still pertinent to a 21st century classroom in a progressive independent school.

To make the ink we are using the highly composted/aged/fermented contents of a 5 gallon bucket of black walnut hulls in water, which dates back not just one but TWO Autumns ago (i.e., Autumn 2012). Fresh walnut hulls are fragrant, even perfume-like. Mine, as it turned out, had become manure-like. Continue reading “Black Walnut Ink”

Microscopic Fiber Images

Gardening season is kicking into gear here in Amherst, MA. This year I am planning to add swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) and amsonia (Amsonia spp.) to my fiber and dyeplant garden at Bramble Hill Farm. I got the swamp milkweed seeds from my sister, Simone, from a plant near her apartment. You can see a photo of some cordage I made from it in an earlier blog post here.

I was inspired to grow amsonia after botanist and fellow-flax-enthusiast, Carolyn, brought some gorgeous bast fibers from her amsonia plants to one of our flax and linen study group get-togethers. On my initial foray to Andrew’s Greenhouse yesterday I found three varieties of amsonia available, but wasn’t sure which one might be best, so I shot off an email to Carolyn. She sent back some good advice, plus this incredibly awesome link which I must now urgently share with anyone else who might be reading my blog! Continue reading “Microscopic Fiber Images”

More Queen Anne’s Lace

Since Queen Anne’s Lace has been so abundant this year, I wanted to experiment with using the entire plant, roots and all, for dyeing. Quite a lot of plants needed to be weeded out of our garden plot, so on August 2nd I decided to try it. I was pretty certain it would make yellow, which is the most common color from wildflowers, but you never know until you try.

When I am dyeing, I often think of Jill Goodwin’s summary of her dyeing philosophy in her introduction to A Dyer’s Manual. I find two of her points especially comforting and motivational:

  • “Only use the results of other people as a rough guide, for their conditions will not be the same as your own. Prove everything by your own efforts.”
  • “Persevere with each problem, for sometimes after years of thought the solution will become clear.”

So, I do try to prove everything with my own efforts. And I try to persevere with each problem. Hopefully over the years I solve some of them.

Queen Anne's Lace roots and allI pulled up many plants and chopped them up with pruning shears. I got 4 lbs. 8 oz. of plant material. I liked the cauldron-esque look of the dye pots with stems, leaves, flowers, and especially the roots. Whereas the flowers alone smell lemony and sweet while they are simmering, the whole plant smells a bit more like carrots, as you might imagine. Lemony carrots. Continue reading “More Queen Anne’s Lace”

Queen Anne’s Lace and Woad

Supposedly this blog is about dyeing. Even though I don’t seem to write about it very often, I do sometimes actually dye things. This week I had great success with woolen yarns using Queen Anne’s Lace flowers. Plus I managed a successful woad vat, aerated and everything. Here are the lovely yellows, greens, and blues hanging on the line to dry in the back yard (each skein is about 4 ounces).

wool dyed with Queen Anne's Lace and woad Continue reading “Queen Anne’s Lace and Woad”