The Garden Museum is creating a new Dye bed in our Healing Garden this year, Head of Learning Janine Nelson explains how the project started:
Last year as part our Wild Escape Art Fund project with primary schools and families, I started making botanical paints and inks for children to use. These included coffee and tea but I experimented with using turmeric, avocado stones (boiled to create a subtle pink colour), hibiscus flowers and onion skins. I tried various way to make green e.g. spinach but was unsuccessful so resorted to using green ink in the sessions!
My personal interest grew in terms of creativity, but also sustainability. When there was a natural dye workshop at the museum in the autumn and I was unable to attend, my colleague, Gemma Clarke, our Family Learning Officer, wrote up her notes and shared them with me. She later made botanical colours to use for one of her family sessions and gave me the left over colours which I used to dye ribbons and threads a range of subtle, and not so subtle, colours.
I decided to sign up to a residential course at West Dean in Sussex with Zoe Burt in April. There, over the course of a long weekend, I explored botanical inks and dyes – using them to colour fabric and thread samples but also for drawing with – sitting in the spring sunshine in West Dean’s beautiful gardens (where we also discovered a dye garden in the grounds). Cyanotypes were another medium which we explored, picking leaves and flowers for making sun prints.
I had invited Zoe Burt, who has been Head of Textiles at Morley College until very recently, to exhibit students’ work at the museum. We had previously collaborated with Morley College textiles department on projects and exhibited student and tutor textiles in 2014 and again in 2017. When meeting with her to discuss the exhibition, she told me about a Seasonal Dyeing and Printing course at Morley College which she ran. I signed up and on a series of Tuesdays explored natural dyeing in greater depth. We were introduced to the Dye Garden at Morley College, which was created in collaboration with Permablitz London, and serves the textiles department.
In early April it was still looking quite dormant but by May, the plants were really taking off and there was some colour from the calendulas. We were encouraged to draw in the garden each week, observing changes and to pick leaves to use in class e.g. privet to create a dye bath for cloth, ferns and rose leaves to press and steam in the eco/botanical printing process. The course explored sustainable practice in textiles, with the use of plant based dyes for colouring fabric. We explored silk screen printing making our own plant based printing inks to use.
During the first session, we sowed seeds of dye plants – weld, madder, woad – the three heritage colours known as the ‘grand teints’ as well as black hollyhock, fennel, calendula, bedstraw, indigo, amongst others, watering them each week. In the light, and warmth of the Morley College textile studio some of them soon began to germinate.
By the time the Morley College course finished, I was hooked on the idea of creating a dye garden at the Garden Museum. I booked myself onto a one-day course in Hitchin with Susan Dye and her husband Ashley to learn more about the practicalities of making a dye garden from scratch. Susan and Ashley run Nature’s Rainbow and sell dye plants and seeds. Their dye garden is on an allotment where we spent the afternoon sowing seeds. The course was brilliant, and I came away inspired with plants, seeds and more knowledge.
Time to put it into action!
I met with the new community gardener in our Healing Garden and handed over my newly purchased plants and seeds from my day at Hitchin – Saw-wort (Serratula tinctoria), European Golden Rod (Solidago Virgaurea), Dyer’s Greenweed (Genista tinctoria), Common Madder (Rubia tinctorum), Lance Leaved Coreopsis (Coreopsis lanceolata) and Tansy (Tanacetum vulgare). I gave her my seedlings grown at Morley College. I had purchased seeds earlier in the year from Balliwick Blue, based in Guernsey – Dyers Camomile (Anthemis Tinctoria,) Early sunrise Coreopsis (Lance leaf Coreopsis), Coreopsis Tinctoria, Sulphur Cosmos, Pink Flowering long leaf Indigo (“Senbon” Persicaria Tinctoria). These had been sown by the museum gardeners and were in the greenhouse. I was told that not all had been successful. I’d have to wait and see.
In doing research on dye gardens, I’d established a few which I wanted to visit. One of these was at Cambridge University Botanic Garden where artist Nabil Ali is on an artist residency linked to making paints from plants in the garden. I had met Nabil in 2018 at the museum so decided to get in touch with him. I arranged to meet him and had a first hand tour of the Dye Trail in the Botanic garden with Nabil explaining his work. Other Dye gardens on my list to visit include the Horniman Museum which I have seen before but also Ditchling Museum where Jenny Dean teaches natural dyeing courses. Glyndebourne has a Dye garden which our curator Emma House visited and wrote about here.
Meanwhile, we have a display of textiles made by Morley College students from Zoe Burt’s Seasonal Natural Dyeing and Printing course on our Community Wall and in a nearby display case until Sunday 8th September. Examples of the techniques mentioned above will be exhibited alongside items made by students especially for the Garden Museum exhibition. Below are some screen printed textiles made with natural dyes, botanical extracts and modifiers on wool, silk, linen and cotton. These were produced collaboratively by students on the Winter Seasonal and Natural Dyeing and Printing course and exhibited at Morley Gallery in April.
