Nature Versus Nurture?

One of the issues that arises as soon as one considers natural dyestuffs is, what is ‘natural'? I have several trees, plants, flowers and vegetables growing in my own garden that yield dyestuff, including: onions, hawthorn, eucalyptus, ash, ivy, angelica, fennel, sage, St John’s wort, apple, daffodil, black elder, rowan, cardoons and day lily. Many of these are not native to Loughton or, indeed, to the UK. 

Apples, my first plant source, grew wild in Britain in the Neolithic period but it was the Romans who first introduced varieties with a sweeter taste. The earliest known mention of apples in England was by King Alfred in about 885 AD, but the variety of apple that I sourced my prunings from, Cox’s Orange Pippin, is much more recent than that, having been introduced into English orchards in 1850. The mother tree was raised by Richard Cox, a retired brewer from Bermondsey. It was probably widespread in cottage gardens in Loughton from late Victorian times onwards. 

Yew, my second source for natural dye, is one of three conifers that are native to Britain, the others being Juniper and Scots Pine. Yew trees can reach many hundreds of years old, and ten in Britain are believed to predate the 10th century. Our Loughton churchyard trees are ‘babies’ by comparison, dating from the end of the nineteenth century. Both these plants would have been available to local dyers before Milton Keynes was even a gleam in the town planner’s eye.

Today, locally in Loughton I can find many more dye-yielding plants including: yarrow, hollyhock, alder, birch, blackberry, cherry plum, blackthorn, rhubarb, docks, elderberry, elm, yew, carrot, fig, damson, iris, ragwort, reeds, sloes, snowberry, lichens, dahlia, Queen Anne’s lace, walnut, juniper, mahonia, bracken, oak, holm oak, stagshorn sumach, willow, dandelion, nettles, horse chestnut, floribunda roses and fuschia. Some of these grow in my neighbours' gardens, others in the modern linear park that has been planted by MK Parks Trust to follow the course of an ancient brook, but some of the plants on this list are weeds or wild flowers that are native to the UK. 

Many truly native plants yield only variants of green, yellow or brown that some might consider rather drab or boring. To obtain a true red or blue, I shall have to draw on cultivated plants. If I become even more enthusiastic about this project than I already am, I could plant a ‘dyer’s garden’ in our local allotment, to enrich the resources that are available to me locally to include more specialised plants like: dyer’s alkanet, dyer’s chamomile, pot and French marigold, heather, safflower, coreopsis, goldenrod, yellow cosmos, dahlias, lady’s bedstraw, dyer's woad, dyer’s knotweed (not the same as Japanese knotweed) weld, madder, comfrey and sunflowers. I make the rules for this project, but would this be considered ‘cheating’?

I propose to resolve this dilemma by allowing both wild and cultivated plants into my repertoire, but I may choose at a later date to differentiate native species from cultivated ones. This will allow me to explore both the colour palette that would have been available to the natural dyer some 50 years ago, before Milton Keynes came into being and when Loughton was a small village in the north Buckinghamshire countryside, and also the wider repertoire of colours that is available to the contemporary dyer, including varieties of exotic species found in local residents’ gardens and in the landscaping that has been introduced during recent times to support the new city’s development. The only restriction on my harvesting practice will be that everything should be sourced locally and sustainably (that is, without damaging the local ecology). 

It should be fun later on to classify my skeins of dyed yarn in order to illustrate a variety of concepts, such as the changing seasons, cultivated plants and weeds, different historical periods, even dyes obtained from different parts of the plant.