I had the chance to sample fallen dried leaves of Eucalyptus Eximia, the yellow bloodwood. Such spectacular bark!
Needless to say, I didn’t pass up the opportunity!
Apparently I did pass up the opportunity to take a picture of the entire tree, but here you have bark, trunk, leaves and immature fruit
And the result from the dyepot…
Just for your viewing pleasure–some more of the glorious native Australian plants at Wittunga Botanical Gardens–
These are banksias at their splendid best.
Filed under Dye Plants, Eucalypts, Natural dyeing
These massive trees are a feature planting at Wittunga Botanical Gardens. I am sure they are far from full grown, but they are huge! I gathered fallen leaves from beneath them and since I was playing a game of trying to identify eucalypts as I walked up to them but before I could see their name tags–I guessed they were E Saligna. My eucalypt handbook assures me the two are closely related, so perhaps I’m learning something…
I had a significant amount of plant material relative to this tiny sample, but apparently this tree gives colour. There were, of course, so many beautiful plants. This one is Calistemon Rugulosus var Rugolosus:
There is also a magnificent persimmon tree in the grounds. Perhaps it pre-dates the gardens, since they are focused on Australian and South African plants. A persimmon in autumn is always a glorious sight, but this one is huge and spreading and even more magnificent than those I can see in my neighbourhood right now.
And, of course, it is in fruit–those glowing orbs are just so beautiful… I’ve been investing in a couple each week at the farmer’s market and they are delectable!
Filed under Dye Plants, Eucalypts, Natural dyeing
The ‘Beloved tree’ banners are out in the neighbourhood. A bunch of us put up the first couple, and I pedalled around attaching the rest on Mother’s Day. This one is on a massive ironbark.
It stands beside the tram bridge in Goodwood.
This one is dwarfed by a huge E Camaldulensis in a park beside Brownhill Creek.
This trunk has survived a lot of depredations, whether human, animal or insect.
I’ve tried to capture a sense of its canopy…
But it is hard to show all there is to see when you stand beneath its curved limbs and beside that massive trunk. Needless to say it isn’t all about what you can see, in any case.
This is the place where lorikeets sometimes nest. I’ve seen them wiggling their way in through the hole they have nibbled out of the pace where a branch used to be, as well as flying out at speed like small, feathered, green comets.
This next tree is an E Sideroxylon. It stands outside the Le Cornu warehouse on Leader St.
I used to be able to reach its lowest leaves, but the chainsaws took off the lower limbs some time back. It is still magnificent.
The light wasn’t great for it, but since there is at least one appreciator of industrial buildings reading, here is a shot of the background. I oriented my banner toward pedestrians.
Next, one of the largest E Cinereas in the neighbourhood, standing outside what seems to be a disused office in Leader St. Perhaps people work there but are not interested in the garden!
It has suffered the chainsaw too, losing a truly huge bough.
Still glorious.
Still vast.
Finally, my old friend on the corner of Laught and East Sts. I thought this was an E Scoparia at first, but while the leaves give amazing colour, the bark produces a different result than other E Scoparias I’ve dyed with. Name, uncertain. Beauty, obvious.
This time I was spared conversation with the tree hater who lives opposite this tree and can only see it as a source of litter. I was on the bike, so picked up a bagful of fallen dried leaves. When I have more carrying capacity I take fallen twigs and whatever bark or wood is lying beneath it in hopes of mollifying the tree hater.
Fabulous. I must say that visiting all these beloved trees and wrapping my arms around each one… I did feel like a tree hugger. And proud!
Filed under Craftivism, Dye Plants, Eucalypts, Neighbourhood pleasures
Last year, I tried a cold vinegar process on some indigofera australis. The result was very pale blue, but just the same, blue, especially on silk and linen. I thought this time I’d stick to silk. I also found a direct dyeing method described online and decided to try it out on my indigofera australis.
My friend and I stripped the leaves from the stems and into the blender they went.
Pretty soon we had finely mushed leaves.
I tried both the vinegar method and the direct dye method with no success to speak of, even after repeated dippings.
Remember that the wool on the right of each sample card has been mordanted with rhubarb leaf, so wasn’t white to begin with.
Well, I thought I had nothing to lose by leaving the leaves and the liquid to sit for a few days and trying again, so I reunited the pulverised leaves and the two dye baths.
I thought I’d try hydrosulphite, the last resort in case of indigo failure, in my case. I warmed the liquid and strained out the leaves.
I have recently received a Ph meter as a gift, so I aimed for 10.5 and added washing soda in solution until I reached it. The result was a striking yellow.
However… absolutely no blue whatsoever, not even an improvement on samples I thought I might overdye for improved colour.
Time of harvest? User error in the process? The Ph meter isn’t properly calibrated? The thermometer is out of whack (it certainly didn’t agree with the one on the Ph meter, so I knew one of them must be wrong–and I now know it was the thermometer)? I have no idea, honestly. I’ve decided to leave my one Japanese indigo plant to keep for seed…
Filed under Dye Plants, Natural dyeing
Once upon a time, I used to make ginger beer, recycling glass beer bottles for the purpose. We had some with us one time years ago when I was travelling by (even-then-antique) Kombi. We stopped at a wonderful national park, near Hattah Lakes. There was a long walk in intense dry heat. We walked much further than we planned, perhaps having failed to fully understand the map on the sign before setting out. The water in the lakes was so low that we eventually realised we were not seeing eels in the lake, we were seeing the spines of large fish as they swam in water so shallow that it was barely as deep as the fish were tall. We got back to the Kombi, and since we’d been walking for hours, and we were on holiday, opened up the back of the van and lay down on the bed for a nap. We’d been there a little while when there was an almighty bang. We sat up pretty quickly, because to our untrained ears, it sounded like a gunshot. There were no other people in sight and only one car in the distance. All fell quiet. No dramatic action. Eventually realisation dawned on one of us, and the three way (gas–electric–car battery) fridge was opened. Inside it were the remains of a bottle of ginger beer which had exploded under the pressure of its own contents, sprayed though the vegies and suchlike. Three cheers for the fridge keeping the glass shards safely contained. Long story short–all bottles of ginger beer stashed under the bed were emptied right there and then, and I never put ginger beer in glass again, except once the lid was off!
In case you can’t tell, this is a sideways introduction to my circumspection about the state of my steeping jars of dyestuff. I’ve had some difficulty getting a good seal with with the Stuff, Steep and Store method. The first time, I think I raised the temperature too quickly. It’s a vice I’ve been known to indulge in (or a problem I’ve suffered from, depending on source of heat) when preserving fruit, too. I resealed some jars and took additional steps to ensure a good seal. But several of the lids began to dome up again (or just plain leak). This one (pelargonium petals) leaked, as you can see.
Luckily I had stored it on top of another jar. Ahem. So much dye lost!
The very reverse of a vacuum seal (which is the intention), all of this suggested to me the contents were fermenting. Perhaps the lids were damaged. Perhaps my thermometer was actually faulty… I went off and checked when I had this thought on the weekend. Yes, the thermometer was faulty–the little glass blob that should have held it in a fixed position had clearly broken away unnoticed, allowing the whole business part to slide down by about ten degrees. So… back to the drawing board. I am glad I didn’t use that thermometer for preserving peaches and plums! The jars of fruit all came out just fine, which leads me to think that Stuff, Steep and Store should work for me, as it undoubtedly does for others. Clearly I can manage a vacuum seal under favourable circumstances. The good news on my jars of dye is that it looks like I got colour even though these jars haven’t steeped as long as I planned. Here they are wet from their baths… and not smelling especially fermented.
From left to right, pelargonium petals (greyer and less blue than the image); dyers’ chamomile, brown onion skins, and E Scoparia exhaust dye bath on various silk threads. Since it’s my patience and my thermometer and not the method that are at fault… I decided to try again.
From left to right (below): red hibiscus flowers, dried prunus leaves and fallen flowers from an unusual, purple-leaved hibiscus I found almost at the end of its flowering season when I visited the Himeji Japanese gardens on the weekend. Each with vinegar, sea water, silk/cotton thread and aluminium foil. Wait and see!
Filed under Dye Plants, Natural dyeing
My attention was caught by another eucalypt in the parklands. It was the colour of the flowers that attracted my interest. I don’t remember seeing it in flower before. Something about this purplish shade of pink caught my eye.
The tree itself was rather unprepossessing at a distance.
It seems to be managing to grow despite having survived multiple insults and lost limbs if not its entire primary trunk at some point in the past.
On the other hand, this had clearly created an opportunity: the hollow at the base of the trunk had been chosen as home by bees, who were flying in and out the whole time I was watching (they would be the small blurs in the photo).
I took a small sample and really… this tree is safe from me. The alum mordanted sample gave a good brown and the no mordant sample, a pinkish shade of tan.
Filed under Dye Plants, Eucalypts, Natural dyeing
While I was in the Western suburbs recently, I went for a wander and saw what I thought at first glance were olive trees. Shame on me for not looking more closely: these were oak trees, as evidenced by the acorns.
On the other hand, looking at those leaves, this is not a variety of oak I’m accustomed to. The most common oak in my neighbourhood is the English oak (Quercus Robur), which has quite a distinctive leaf shape: nothing like this one. The next most common is the cork oak (Quercus Suber): there are a couple in a nearby park which are a constant source of wonder to me. Perhaps I am just not paying attention. I found this site listing quite a few oaks on a site from my own city–so many different oaks must be grown here. While I was in Melbourne there was a leaf I could only have said was not native on the table during the Second Skin workshop. India Flint pronounced it an oak, and that evening I saw loads of them planted down the side of a street. With acorns–which are evidently the only mental clue I have for identifying unfamiliar oaks. So I recently understood there must be members in the oak family I hadn’t met. To look at this tutorial on identifying oak leaves in North America, the leaf I saw in Melbourne was a red oak and the ones I know better are white oaks.
Just to add to the mystery, where the trees had re-sprouted after being cut back, there were juvenile leaves that were positively prickly along the leaf margins. Well–I decided to gather a few leaves and acorns and try them out. The result was not really exciting… but then I have never seen so many acorns in one place and there are dyeing applications for acorns I’ve never tried. So perhaps the future still holds possibilities!
Filed under Dye Plants, Natural dyeing
As we drove home from exercise group last Saturday morning, it became clear that a big part of a tree had been cut down beside a warehouse-style business near home. A big chunk of tree canopy was lying on the footpath. I didn’t think I had sampled the tree in question, but there are several in that area that look like E Scoparia, but have been pruned to branch very high–out of reach. There isn’t much hope of my identifying this one–it has no fruit, flowers or buds on it right now, though it does have red twigs and white-barked branches and leaves the right shape for E Scoparia. I have had some success with leaves from the gutters on that street, but not right where these branches were lying. I went back and applied my secateurs.
To my sadness when I actually stopped I could see that a tree had been felled and that its trunk had been taken away. The very base of it was all that was left, and it was clear that a large section of the root mass had rotted away or become diseased. Just the same… the continuing loss of trees around our way feels relentless. This week someone else aggrieved by the felling of three massive trees on one block which I posted about recently took a spray can to the fence of the block in question. One fence had something I can’t fully reprint here: ‘What the f*** have you done?’, and the other fence said the neighbourhood was in mourning for the loss of the trees and that planning laws should be changed. I thought I would take a photo but this morning there was a chap with a paintbrush taking it out less than 48 hours after it went up.
But this is no reason to allow all the leaves of this felled tree to go to commercial composting if I could dye with them and then compost them. Needless to say, after this flame orange result, I went back and cut all I could get into a chaff bag (that’s a very big sack, in my terms). As a bonus to my visit, the tree had been felled beside an E Cinerea, so I picked up every last leaf that had fallen from the E Cinerea too. I’ll be running a workshop at my Guild in June and I’ll need to bring a goodly amount of dye material.
This next eucalypt was standing in the parklands in North Adelaide. I went there early one morning for an appointment so had a walk before my appointment. I decided to sample it because India Flint suggests silver grey leaved eucalypts are promising dye plants. The buds were so pretty!
Clearly when it flowers there are many flowers… but not yet…
The tree was an interesting shape…
There was the intriguing feature of two different coloured trunks coming from one lignotuber.
And I just can’t explain why there were so many land snails, but I love land snails.
The result in the dyebath was a pale apricot.
Then there was this tree, growing on the far outskirts of my workplace just outside a car park. It seems like a box (one branch of the eucalypt family) to me.
It was gloriously in flower, full of bees and birds.
When I went back in the evening, I realised there were a few of these trees and there were also fallen branches. Well worth sampling, in my view!
I loved the colour from this plant, and I used a dyeing strategy India Flint described in Melbourne. Far less energy use and potential for fibre damage… and clearly this may become my new normal way to dye with eucalypts!
Filed under Dye Plants, Eucalypts, Natural dyeing
On my bike ride home from work (about a 40 minute ride), I pass just one Eucalyptus Cinerea. Well, there are two, but one is inside someone’s front garden. A person has to have some boundaries! The street tree had dropped a small branch.
I decided I’d better collect it. Usually I carry a calico bag in my bike pannier for such contingencies, but this was what I found when I scrabbled about in the bottom of my pannier on the day, so in went all the stray leaves I could find.
This tree has had to contend with a lot. It has had a very strange pruning job designed to protect the electrical wires that now pass through its branches. The pruning took out a lot of the canopy, but the tree is still standing. For this, I am grateful.
Recent events have caused me to reflect on the way I think about trees on my regular routes… like old acquaintances. I think about them as I pass, the way I think of people when I pass near their homes without visiting. I notice what happens to them. I check them over when I have the chance. I remember how they were when they were younger, or before that accident befell them. It’s not entirely unlike the way I notice people I don’t know well, but see out and about in the neighbourhood regularly.
Further along, I saw that my “thanks for cycling” bunting had been ripped and some of it was lying on the ground. Soon it was in my other pannier headed for the mending pile.
A few days later, the E Cinerea made it into the dye pot and produced its usual dependable flamelike orange. I also collected some ironbark leaves that had fallen in the parklands near where we had exercise class. Once the E Cinerea was all but exhausted I reused that dyebath with the ironbark leaves, thinking I would save water and energy, but clearly this was not E Sideroxylon–it produced that sad, damp little pile of fawn alpaca on the right.
I have come to regard this as a sign: The orange leaves in the picture below are the E Cinerea leaves, which have gone from silver-grey-green to orange in the dyebath. The ironbark leaves, on the other hand, have remained a robustly green shade even after cooking.
And, I’ve mended the bunting ready to hang it again on a suitable occasion…
Filed under Craftivism, Dye Plants, Eucalypts, Natural dyeing, Neighbourhood pleasures
I found this tree in flower in a park in West Lakes (my sweetheart is a triathlete, and that is what you can see happening in the background).
The trunk was smooth and shiny with some peeled bark, and as you can see, the whole tree has been shaped by the prevailing wind.
The flowers were a yellow shade of green, with the older flowers turning brown. There were two generations of buds on long, flattened peduncles (always a striking feature, especially with a name like ‘peduncle’!). The bud caps were 15 mm long–much smaller than the Yates that I know. Perhaps someone else can confirm or deny whether this is E Macrandra! I will regain access to Euclid (the CSIRO eucalypt database) later this month after a long, long time when it wouldn’t work for me… and I can’t wait! For the time being I’m depending on my trusty book collection, which has its limits–and so do I.
Results like these have me wondering why I would ever bother using walnut hulls for deep browns. I am blessed with great choices in oranges and browns, for sure.
Filed under Dye Plants, Eucalypts, Natural dyeing
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