I just finished harvesting all my dye things from my garden, here are some snippets.
The red is Elena’s Rojo Amaranth, and old variety that was nearly lost during the civil war in Guatemala, but was brought back by maya communities. It’s named after the indigenous farmer who was primarily responsible for its recovery.
Going clockwise from there is Japanese (or Chinese) Indigo. A historically important plant used for dyes, paints and inks in Asia going back to at least 2000BC.
Next is marigold, a source of reds, oranges and yellows depending on the ph of whatever it’s mixed with. Most plant-based colours are sensitive to ph, for example you can slightly hange the colour of roses by altering the soil ph.
The purple wisps at the bottom are petunias, which aren’t historically used for dye but they had such a rich colour I want to try.
Last are Cinnamon Dyers Coreopsis, a traditional dye plant native to North America, long used by indigenous peoples and settlers for yellows, oranges and reds.
It will be a while before I’m set up to start extracting pigment and making dyes again, but I’m looking forward to posting all about it.
From my experiments with dying usually you don’t get colour from the flowers, usually the roots. I don’t have much experience, but my attempts were underwhelming using the flowers.
Some plants concentrate their colour (anthocyanins) in the roots, true. I grew some madder and murasaki this year as well, but gave them away since I won’t be around to harvest the roots when they’re ready.
With coreopsis, amaranth and marigolds, colour comes from the flower, and with indigo you use the whole plant. I’ve gotten brilliant oranges from marigolds and coreopsis already.
Cool! Indigo is so neat! Such a magical, stinky thing!
The japanese knotweed is exciting. I’ve experimented a bit with using local knotweeds and could get a mild turquoise.
The marigold you have, is it the red-yellow leaves? I am harvesting a lot of marigold flowers this year, my variety is light orange. I’ve dyed a not-too-bad yellow with it - what do you do with it to get reds and oranges?
If only I could get my chaotic household and farm on track again to carve out time for dyeing - your posts are a real inspiration to keep working on that. Thanks for sharing! How difficult/expensive would it be to post some seeds to Southern Europe? I’d love to make the amaranth and indigo part of my garden family!
Thanks for following my journey, hah
That’s awesome you have knotweed growing right there! But I heard it’s invasive as hell.
My marigolds are a deep orange already. To get different shades/colours you’d have to use a mordant (a metallic salt) and fine tune it from there. Sometimes I take small samples of my dye bath and mix in different mordants to see how they’ll change the colour. Typically, iron darkens and copper brightens.
If you can’t get a hold of seeds out there, I can see what I can do. Otherwise, I get most of my dye seeds from https://www.saltspringseeds.com/
Nice, now I’m curious about what plants that grow around my town could be used to make dyes. I know native plants that are related to Genista tinctoria that also have been used to make yellow dyes. There’s also a lot of Hypericum perforatum, when put in olive oil it stains it deep red, I guess it could make a good dye for fabrics.
I hadn’t heard of dyeing with it before, but I’m sure you can try. Interesting that it turns red, I wouldn’t have thought of that.
Looking forward to hearing how it goes. The amaranth looks a lot like the ‘Magenta Magic’ orach that I grow for food (eaten like spinach), which I think is in the amaranth family. It’s probably my favourite plant and I’d be really interested to see if it could also be used as a dye.
I just looked that up, what a cool looking plant. In my experience anything with a deep colour has been great for dyeing. You should give it a shot.
It is very cool! It’s great to eat and I really like that it grows tall. It looks fantastic when it goes to seed as well.
Definitely interested in making some dye from it too!
