The Dye Garden - Autumn Event

To celebrate the arrival of autumn we arranged another community event at the garden. The team did a fantastic job, facilitating an upholstery class in the new woodworking workshop, leading bike rides, planting winter crops, making some fresh soup and hosting local school pupils who came along to harvest toppings and cook a pizza all from the garden produce.

Of course I was there with my flowers and leaves… starting off with some delicious tea made from freshly snipped calendula and fennel.

It was great to have the outdoor cooking space, with wood burning stove and pizza oven, to gather round.

We picked a load of marigold flowers, so many had opened up since the main harvest just a week earlier, and simmered them in water on the stove. We did some more plant hammering - which has become a big favourite activity - and dyed some silk blue with fresh indigo leaves.

After about an hour on the stove I added some pre-treated cotton to the pot with the marigolds, which produced a lovely muted olive green fabric. The remaining dye bath was brought home and went in the fridge for further experiments!

Everyone created beautiful fabrics and botanical art throughout the day and as always the activities sparked some super interesting conversations and connections.

The community that I’ve become part of through the dye garden and these events has been one of the best things to come out of this project. I started out at the beginning of the year looking for a wee bit of land to grow some plants, but have been lucky enough to have gained connections and friendship with some brilliant, knowledgable, welcoming and enthusiastic members of our island community too. I’m really looking forward to planning the next growing season.

The next task is to start using all these pigments in my artwork. The experience of this year, of growing and working in the garden, is something that will undoubtedly find its way into the paintings too!

The Dye Garden - The Harvest

Picking a day to harvest the bulk of the plants in the dye garden was a bit tricky. I had to find a moment between letting them have the last of the sun and avoiding any early frosts, as well as making sure I had time to process the plants after picking them.

I had one free week in the middle of September so, following a short spell of warm(ish) sunny weather at the start of September, we planned the harvest for then.

It was a pretty backbreaking day, carefully snipping leaves and flowers from the five big growing beds. Many of the plants still had lots of buds on so we harvested carefully, to allow another late crop if we could catch it before any frost. We had an end of season community event planned too, so hoped we would have some fresh flowers left for that.

My plan was to extract as much blue as I could from the fresh indigo and woad, processing it into a pigment powder to store, and then dry everything else to use through the autumn and winter months.

Another thank you to Sam for his help with bringing all the plants in. It took me the whole of the week to process everything, fill the drying shelves and hang all the remaining stems.

What an exciting moment to get to though. Very much looking forward to bringing some of these colours into my paintings!

The Dye Garden - Experiments

As the season progressed we did eventually get some short bursts of heat and sun, bringing good growth in the dye beds.

There was a little gentle tidying of the woad and indigo beds, mainly because I wanted to try for the best crop possible for my “From seeds to blue” course and I wasn't sure how competitive any ‘weeds’ would be to their growth, but otherwise I pretty much left the beds to their own devices.

In the first week of August it was time to test the pigment development in the indigo leaves…

Using fresh leaf extraction methods, salt rubbing and ice bath, I processed and dyed some samples of silk, linen and cotton. I was really pleased to see some blue appear, albeit relatively pale! So exciting to see this beautiful colour from the plants we’d grown.

Through August lots of flowers began to appear too.

Across the beds we had: calendula, coreopsis, sunflowers, cosmos, dyer’s chamomile, yarrow and marigolds.

It’s been a super busy 2024 for me and I really didn’t have time to use everything from the garden as it was becoming ready to harvest. So after some research, I decided to dry as much of the plants as I could to preserve their pigment - I’m also still learning all the different ways to process things into useable pigment for my work, so I didn't want to rush this part!

I ended up with several different methods for storing the plants as they dried, from a tiered mesh rack to string stretched across my studio ceiling. A very aesthetically pleasing endeavour.

These mini harvests continued throughout the season, as often as I could get to the garden, but always leaving around a third of the flowers for the bees and insects. This has been as really lovely part of this project, seeing how busy the garden has been with insects, feels like more than just providing me materials that don’t have a negative impact on the environment, this is actually having a positive impact!

(Big thanks to Sam for his help with the harvests and for bringing his camera to document the progress. I got so caught up I often forgot to photograph anything!)

The Dye Garden - Summer Solstice

As we moved towards the summer solstice the weather was still not behaving very summery here on the west coast of Scotland.

You can see the indigo and woad looking quite small here, they were really craving some good sunshine to get the pigment building in those leaves.

Summer solstice garden event

On the solstice itself the wider Bute Produce garden team had organised a celebratory event. Alongside bench building, bike rides and a bee safari, I hosted some art workshops using natural pigments.

As the plants in the dye garden were not ready for harvesting yet, I made some inks and dyes using kitchen waste and foraged plants. I had great fun experimenting with different materials, from avocados and onion skins, to acorn caps and rusty nails!

It was a wonderful day, despite the less than summery weather, and I thoroughly enjoyed meeting so many people. We chatted about natural pigments, sustainable practices and made some beautiful art. We hammered fresh leaves and flowers onto fabric and paper and also painted with the inks I’d made in the kitchen (the stinky red cabbage was a firm favourite ;))

The Dye Garden - Seeding

I’m pleased to be able to let you know more about a new project I’ve just started - learning about natural dyes and pigments, both foraged and grown. ⁣

This is a long term project to bring more environmentally friendly and sustainable materials into my practice, but also to develop my work to serve a little more directly as a voice for nature. ⁣

I intend to forage pigment from various sources on the island and to also grow some plants for colour too. I’m currently on the ‘From Seeds to Blue’ course with Elisabeth Viguie Culshaw in collaboration with the Botanic Gardens in Glasgow, growing indigo and woad.

I’m really lucky to have been supported in this by our local community garden Bute Produce who are affording me a small plot in the garden for these plants, as well as lots of other dye plants. This also means that there will be a lovely community element to this part of the project too, as I link in with the garden’s ‘mindful gardening’ programme. ⁣

We had our first open day event back on the 1st May, where we sowed all the seeds for the Dye Garden and planned what needed to be done to prepare the outdoor beds for planting.

The plants have been progressing well in the polytunnel and we even managed to get some out into the ground at the beginning of June!

The next event will be 21st June 2024, Summer Solstice, where I will host some art activities and the garden team will facilitate other events across the site.

I’ll keep recording progress here and, probably more regularly, on my social media channels.