Any colour as long as it’s green.

Wish I could use that Farrow and Balls tagline…

Enter the magical world of natural plant colour. The colours of nature are all around us: plants, flowers, animals, the sky; but it’s notoriously difficult to get those colours onto anything without a lot of time, effort and elaborate processing that may or may not include poisoning everything around you.

I realise that coming up with a half decent natural colour palette is going to require a bit more knowledge than tea-dying t-shirt’s by flinging a couple of teabags in hot water – which was a lot of fun when I was a kid and easier than trying not to stain my mum’s counter tops with those very difficult to get into little Dylon pots…

From a commercial point of view vegetable dyes can be tricky. It’s difficult to replicate colours – the same recipe will produce different colours depending on the water temperature; chemicals in the dye water (like chlorine); or changes in the dye plant material due to different growing conditions etc. Given this difficulty I’m not really surprised that the majority of people working with dyes and colour have opted for much easier to control chemical dyes. You can replicate colour almost precisely, and they don’t run. It’s all very easy to use provided you have a good set of scales and a thermometer, and even the most rudimentary of dye houses in Nepal have these. Unfortunately, unless you also have the facilities to deal with the effluent from the dyes, you will poison your own and your neighbours’ water. And even if you do have proper drainage you’ll be poisoning the rivers and the sea.

We first looked at using the usual ‘azo free’ dyes that everyone else uses, thinking that ‘azo free’ meant they weren’t really bad. We even made up a nice palette of colours and started thinking of getting the recipes made up – I have to say the azo free dye guys are a really helpful bunch. Sense prevailed when we realised that although they might be free of ’azo’s’, they’re not free of the other chemicals that poison the water (rivers, sea, water table – or all of the above). On a visit to Nepal recently we went to see for ourselves the disaster that is the synthetic dye industry in a country like Nepal, which has no infrastructure to deal with the toxic effluence, and therefore no way to protect the ground or water from being poisoned (more on this later). We were chatting in the office (more a shed than the whitewashed, furnished room that possibly sprang to mind at the word ‘office’.) when we noticed rows of jars all full of barks and flowers, so we asked about their vegetable dying. It turns out they don’t really do much vegetable dying any more as none of their buyers want to use them, but they were willing to pull out the old recipes and send us a few samples.

It took 6 months, but Kathmandu dye house sent us 144 colour swatches of natural colour, and we were quite beside ourselves with excitement. Closer inspection reveals there are a few blues, greens and reds, but 70% of the colours are variations on yellow and brown. They’re using an impressive list of natural ingredients (some of them admittedly poisonous), and I feel upbeat about us being able to all work together to get a good range of colours – I’m aiming for 200.

A fortnight of internet research and night time reading has turned up a few saddening facts: many of those lovely colours some people are getting from vegetable dyes aren’t always permanent and fade quickly (turmeric for example); many cannot be fixed and bleed; and some are actually poisonous and should be avoided. That’s just the dyes. As for mordents, if we use all the available mordents we could probably get a good range of nice bright colours, but given that they are mostly also poisonous they are best avoided.

So, with the mountain of knowledge that I was going to have to somehow acquire looming before me, I was relieved to meet Carla, our new dye friend, at the Eden Project when we joined an Oxford Alumni event. As Tim Smit said we‘d halved the average age at the event single handedly, and whilst the others were discussing the pro‘s and con‘s of chickweed, we escaped to the bio domes. Like all the best meetings, this one was unplanned and happened coincidentally whilst rambling around the garden. I learned more from her in 2 hours than I did from that fortnight of internet reading. It’s good to be reminded that the internet isn’t an expert in anything other than downloading web pages. Expertise comes from people.

She sent me home with some homework:
Send her all my samples and the table of ingredients the dye house has used.
Check what water they’re using. Using Kathmandu ground water for the dying as this might be causing the dominance of dull brown (the water in Kathmandu is full of iron, which is sometimes filtered with makeshift sandstone filters – makeshift as in a bucket with holes filled with sandstone rocks)

Ah, so relaxing to just follow orders… If you’re starting your own business I can recommend paying the occasional consultant.