The Cut Flower Podcast

Rediscovering the Art of Natural Dyeing: From Seed to Sustainable Style

• Roz Chandler / Susan Dye / Ashley • Season 1 • Episode 107

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Text Agony Aunt Roz with your Cutflower Questions.

Welcome to The Cutflower Podcast!
Hi, I’m Roz Chandler, your host, and I’m thrilled to take you on another journey into the world of flowers, creativity, and sustainability. In this episode, I sat down with the amazing Susan Dye and Ashley from Nature's Rainbow. Together, they’ve built a life around growing natural dye plants and educating others about this beautiful craft.

Episode Summary

I had the privilege of learning about Susan and Ashley’s story, from childhood inspirations to creating a dye garden in Hitchin. We talked about their journey into natural dyes, the technicalities of extracting colours, and the sheer joy of wearing or using something made entirely from scratch. We also explored how some dye plants can double as cut flowers and why reconnecting with these sustainable practices is so rewarding.

Takeaways You Won’t Want to Miss:

  1. Natural dyeing is a beautiful blend of art, science, and sustainability.
  2. Key plants like madder, woad, and weld are not only vibrant but also steeped in history.
  3. The preparation process is crucial for achieving bright, long-lasting colors.
  4. Workshops and mentoring bring the joy of natural dyeing to life for everyone.
  5. There’s something special about creating with plants you’ve grown yourself—it’s a soul-nourishing experience.

Resources for You

Get Involved!

If this episode inspired you, tag us with #TheCutflowerPodcast and #Nature’sRainbow. I’d love to hear your questions and comments! You can also pop into The Cut Flower Collective on Facebook to join the conversation.

Let’s Stay Connected
Are you thinking of starting your own dye garden? Susan and Ashley’s workshops and blog are a fantastic place to start. I know I’m inspired to dive in and try something new. Let me know if you’re joining this journey, too!


[00:00:00] Roz Chandler: We'll kick it off with some questions. To both of you really, how did you get into this? What made you start Nature's Rainbow? Where did it all begin? 

[00:00:09] Susan Dye: I'm going to say Ashley has to start the story, actually.

[00:00:13] Roz Chandler: Pass it back to you. 

[00:00:14] Ashley: Yeah, so as I was saying, right at the beginning, I I had it in my head to try and grow some dye plants. And three, the three main dye plants that, that you can grow in the UK, Weld, Woad and Madder. And I do have this little story of of from my childhood that read that I, distinctly remember and that was being in infant school looking at a an exercise book which had a picture in it of some stone age people with a big bowl of berries which which they were making paint from, to paint the cave walls.

[00:00:55] Ashley: And and I went home. I went home that week. I thought, oh, I could do that. I could do that. And I went into the garden and picked some berries, some nice red berries and and mashed them up. And I was terribly disappointed because all I got was this grey mush. But I remembered that. I remembered that.

[00:01:17] Ashley: And, It just come back, it came back to me when I was a lot older. And I thought I know what to do now I know which plants to actually grow that will give me those colors. And it's all started for that really. And 

[00:01:30] Susan Dye: I'm being a man. Oh no, actually never told me that any of this plan.

[00:01:35] Susan Dye: We've had an allotment for many years, probably nearly 25 years in hitching and, he tapped me on the shoulder one day and came home from work. He was working as a horticultural therapist, which is a wonderful job. It's a fantastic thing to do. Everybody watching you does anything to do with flowers and plants.

[00:01:50] Susan Dye: You know what good food it is for your soul. So Ashley was working as a horticultural therapist, came home one day with a sheep's fleece in a bag, freshly shorn off the sheep and said, there you go Susan, find out how you prepare that. And I, it was lovely. I fell in love with it straight away, but it was why he said the matter on the allotment, which is a route needs to grow.

[00:02:10] Susan Dye: The matter has been growing for three years. It's ready now. Now it's over to you. We've got to work at one. I claim that he never mentioned anything, but it started a journey that has just, never stopped being fascinating and very rewarding. So we've been growing a dye garden in Hitchin for about 15 years and we have got the key dye plants and then we've added on lots of others, which are delightful, interesting and useful in different ways.

[00:02:35] Susan Dye: And it's all, and actually has an original background in graphic design and illustration. The mission always was to be able to paint with your own paint. We haven't got there yet, but I still think that might happen. 

[00:02:46] Roz Chandler: That's a dream, yeah, to paint with your own paint, wow. 

[00:02:49] Susan Dye: And it's hilarious because my surname is dye, D Y E, and it's got nothing to do with, where I come from in Norfolk, it's a very common name, and there's no ancestral story to do with dying in, in, it's a very important dying centre in Norwich.

[00:03:02] Susan Dye: But maybe he just, I thought, nice name I'll hang out with her. I don't know. 

[00:03:08] Ashley: I don't know. 

[00:03:09] Susan Dye: So it's, yeah, it's, we've been, yeah, just enjoying growing dye plants and learning about them and rediscovering how they give you the best colours, really. 

[00:03:19] Roz Chandler: So what is the process? What is the process? You obviously grow Mada, that's the only one I'm aware of.

[00:03:25] Susan Dye: Yeah, the growing, the plants are all a bit different in what they need in terms of conditions. And some of the plants are. Perennials, which is the matter which gives the red, which is what this bright red jumper is. , some are biennials. Woe, which is the sort of ancient Britain's blue, that, that is a biennial and weld, which gives the best yellow that you can grow in this country is also a biennial.

[00:03:48] Susan Dye: But, so that's roughly speaking, that tells you something about the horticulture. But the processing of the dyes is very different according to the different plants. For most yellows, it's just like making a soup. Essentially, you mustn't overcook it, you just add water and heat it, or add water and leave it for a long time.

[00:04:09] Susan Dye: And you can trade heat for time, usually in these processes. Strain it off, as you would like, Strain the liquid once you've made your soup, so to speak, and then you put your prepared material in it and for different periods of time to get different colors. There's a whole sort of science of how to prepare the materials, whether it's fabric, fiber, yarn, before you put it in.

[00:04:37] Susan Dye: So that's a technical, that's a technical challenge. But but with the madder because it's a root and it's hard and some dyes come from barks. Some come from actual, the wood inside trees. And that takes a lot longer to get the colour out. It's not like just pouring hot water on a plant.

[00:04:52] Susan Dye: some fresh green leaves or some flowers that will give you color immediately, but something that's locked in a root or a bark or some tree wood will take longer to get out. But essentially you're just getting the dye molecules into solution and then finding a way of getting them to bond nicely and strongly to the protein or the cellulose that forms your fiber fabric or yarn.

[00:05:14] Roz Chandler: So what sort of fabrics? 

[00:05:15] Susan Dye: I, you can work with. Any natural fabrics will work. Some synthetic fabrics will, but it's just so nice to work with natural fabrics when you're working with a natural dye. So there, there are two broad categories, protein fibers and So your protein is silk and wool and alpaca and angora and any other animal produced fibers.

[00:05:38] Susan Dye: And they have a good affinity for natural dyes. And then cellulose is like linen, cotton. They're much easier to digest. They're much stronger physically, and they're not so amenable to attaching to the dye molecules. So you have to put a bit more work in to prepare those to take the colour well.

[00:05:56] Susan Dye: And what is certainly true of us is I think most people who start on the journey, you get better at preparing your materials. And the better you get, it's like building up the soil, isn't it? You put the hard graft into the boring stages, and then when you come to do the final stage, which is the dyeing, you will get brighter, more colourfast colours.

[00:06:17] Susan Dye: So very often when people start, they get pale pastels and with madder often they don't get a red at all. You're getting coral pinks and pretty rose pinks, but particularly on cellulose, but to try and get those bright strong colors requires a bit more skill. Yeah, 

[00:06:34] Roz Chandler: I mean from our point of view, in wedding work, if we were doing ribbons, for instance, we would want them to be pale pink and coral and that kind of thing.

[00:06:41] Roz Chandler: Yes, of course yeah. So that would be absolutely fine, but then having looked at that jumper, if I was doing a jumper, I'd like it that color. So it's it's all a learning exercise, I'm sure.

[00:06:53] Roz Chandler: Complete learning exercise. So do you dye everything? What do you do now? What's your business set up? 

[00:06:59] Susan Dye: I would say really what we are is educators about the process, both the horticulture process and the dyeing process and the mordanting, which is this technical preparation that you need to do to the fibres.

[00:07:13] Susan Dye: So we don't really produce product. To sell. We have, as a result of growing lots of things we do have a surplus of Madder Root and Yellow from Weld. And, we talk about, we should be a bit more organized and actually package it up and sell it rather than, but we love running workshops and workshops require a lot of raw material.

[00:07:33] Susan Dye: And so our garden really is providing the materials for us to run the workshops. 

[00:07:39] Ashley: Yeah, it's a lot of other people, they will run workshops, they'll buy in material to do them. Whereas we can just walk down from the place where we have the workshops, walk down to the garden, and there it all is. And we can pick it, pick all the stuff fresh, and then it's straight into, straight to the pot.

[00:08:02] Ashley: And dying. So it's, you see the whole thing, you see the whole thing which is, I think, one of the nice things that we can offer. 

[00:08:11] Roz Chandler: I can't say I've ever seen a madder plant or any of the other two you mentioned, Walder. I can't say I've ever seen them growing. One of the questions has just come in and says, could I ask if there is a dye plant root?

[00:08:23] Roz Chandler: That would also be a lovely flower or foliage in a vase, so it has a couple of uses in the garden. I don't know what they look like, so whether they can be a cut flower, or whether they're actually just grown for dye. 

[00:08:35] Susan Dye: The three classic medieval dyes are really not that attractive, I would say, as a cut flower.

[00:08:41] Susan Dye: The one, Madaroot, is The Madder plant that gives the wonderful root to give the red dye is like a large version of cleavers or sticky buds. The weeds that you throw on somebody and it would stick on them. 

[00:08:53] Susan Dye: So it's quite, We love it because of the red it gives us, but it's not particularly, it's a very pretty leaf in walls around, there's a wall of leaves around a square stem and then another wall and then another, and so that's a pretty structure.

[00:09:08] Susan Dye: I think we were discussing this earlier and we think Weld is, you sometimes see it growing wild on roadsides in chalky and limestone areas. It's a tall spike. This is a biennial in the second year. It puts up this tall flower spike. Sometimes called Dyer's Rocket. Yes, but it's a very tiny yellow flower.

[00:09:26] Susan Dye: So although the bees love it, they're all brilliant wildlife plants. It's not particularly showy. You might be able to use it in a very big arrangement if you wanted some drama and height. But the thing that might have potential, we think, is woad because you use the first year plant, the biennial first year rosette in the dyeing, but we always leave some to go to second year to flower.

[00:09:47] Susan Dye: And it has a wonderful cloud of yellow flowers. Really exquisite. It's early in the year when there's not much else happening. I'm not sure how good the flowers would be as a cut flower. They might not last very long, but the seed heads are very beautiful. They're a deep blue black shiny winged seed and you get masses of them on this umbellifer type shaped, they're a cabbage family.

[00:10:08] Susan Dye: And the seeds are beautiful. Gorgeous. Really beautiful. And I think in dried flower arranging or if you just want some deep purple in a fresh arrangement, they're gorgeous. 

[00:10:17] Ashley: They've certainly been used in flower arranging in the past. I don't know whether people still do, but they certainly have been in the past.

[00:10:24] Susan Dye: So that, that's a really good one. But then there's a whole other, those are the three top medieval, the medieval, Grand Tante it was called, where they're top notch, you want your royalty to have beautifully dyed silks and velvet, they're not going to want it to fade it'll be handed down through generations, so you would only be allowed to use these top three, World, Woad and Madder, and perhaps a little bit of Dyer's Broom, which is a substitute.

[00:10:46] Susan Dye: Dyer's Broom is pretty, that one has got potential, I think, it's a much more delicate, pretty broom than your standard broom. But then there's another layer of dye plants, which are moderately good in colour fastness and very pretty. And there's a whole, there's lots of options once you move down to that level.

[00:11:03] Susan Dye: Yeah, I think there's probably a whole handout on the overlaps, 

[00:11:07] Roz Chandler: but 

[00:11:08] Susan Dye: then there's another, then you go down to all all flowers, almost everything. If you boil them up, you'll get some yellow, which might last for a short amount of time. And people do botanical printing with things, but while you might get some pretty colors from rose petals or sweet peas in botanical printing they will fade and lose their color.

[00:11:26] Susan Dye: And, but again, that isn't necessarily a problem if you're in in the wedding, for event management side of things, but, so 

[00:11:33] Ashley: The good flowers, which will certainly double up as cut flowers, the things like dahlia, coreopsis. Cosmos. Yeah, this is Cosmos Solfurious, not the South African Cosmos.

[00:11:45] Ashley: What else? All the tagetes, 

[00:11:46] Susan Dye: the French marigolds, African marigold. 

[00:11:50] Ashley: They're all, they all make very good dye plants. And also we're not into cut flowers particularly. We do pick them and with you, we have them all over the house. Yeah. But we don't really know, we're not, we don't know much about them really.

[00:12:03] Ashley: I 

[00:12:03] Susan Dye: don't know. We don't really like. No, my, my mother loved growing flowers for cutting. I've got. I get the back garden. The back garden's my territory. So there's quite a lot of flowers for pure aesthetic cutting and scent and things like that. But but there are things like Hellenium is not bad.

[00:12:19] Susan Dye: The Asteraceae family is not bad. It's not brilliant, but it'll give you yellows and golds. And we've just had a wonderful season of Hellenium that they're worth having your the Ridbeckias wow. Yeah. Or the DERs Kaile. Those will give you oranges and gold. And then the herbs, there are quite a lot of herbs that will give you bronzes if you pick them at the beginning of the season, they'll give you gorgeous bronze colors.

[00:12:42] Roz Chandler: Yeah, which we, using floristry, we use a lot of herbs. 

[00:12:45] Susan Dye: And so you s say Sage, Marra, Morano. Bistort is another great one from the, quite a lot of wild plants, pond marginals, things like that will give you golds and bronzes, but you've got to get them at the beginning of the season, really. 

[00:12:59] Roz Chandler: Wow. So why have we lost all this?

[00:13:01] Roz Chandler: Why is it a dying art? Why is it? 

[00:13:04] Susan Dye: I think 

[00:13:04] Ashley: it's Synthetics. There was 

[00:13:06] Susan Dye: the whole chemical dyeing revolution, really, which was dyeing was a huge driver for the evolution of chemistry in the 19th centuries. Really, the only reason they discovered chemistry was for medicinal healing purposes.

[00:13:20] Susan Dye: And, but the textiles were the massive profit making driver for the development of synthetic dyes, which about 1860, the first ones began. And then they by, by 1900, 1910, they were dominating all the synthetic dyes were dominating the industry. And steadily, they just were no longer profitable to grow because they're so concentrated.

[00:13:40] Susan Dye: The chemical dyes give you so much intensity of color. Because the chemical input is so incredible, a lot of them are based on oils. Whereas, you need a lot of dye, you need a lot of plants to get the same impact. But that's the lesson about everything to do with sustainability. The kind of oil based and chemical industry gives you everything at the, the touch of a button.

[00:14:03] Susan Dye: And we don't appreciate just how incredibly powerful and concentrated that is. 

[00:14:07] Roz Chandler: So we can bring it back. 

[00:14:09] Susan Dye: Oh, absolutely. And there are a few people trying to do that with the Fibershed movement. And and as Ash said, it hasn't been completely lost in all parts of the world. It's just, on a big commercial scale, it's very challenging and it's unknown whether it's possible to move our fashion industry.

[00:14:25] Susan Dye: Completely over to the land take would be enormous. So there's people looking at clever ways of finding. Yeah and, I just think what we love is teaching people to do it themselves because it's so nourishing. It's such a wonderful thing to do. Wear a piece of clothing that you've grown, like you're talking about your course earliest from seed to vase, from seed to stitch or from seed to to garment.

[00:14:47] Susan Dye: That's really. You will never stop wearing those items. You'll wear, you'll mend them until, they're all darling and there's nothing of the original left, but it, you cannot put a price on things that you've seen through the entire process. 

[00:15:03] Roz Chandler: So Ashley, you have a blog, I believe.

[00:15:05] Roz Chandler: What's your blog all about? 

[00:15:07] Ashley: Susan started it actually, Susan started the blog and I muscled in with all the information about actually growing the various dye plants that we use and I particularly wanted to do that because there's actually, you can't actually find that kind of detailed information anywhere else.

[00:15:25] Ashley: I used to look on the internet and search and you'd get some basic rudimentary information about some of the plants. But really there was very little indeed out there. And I like to know everything there is to know about, Each plant. It's not, just sticking it in the ground and hoping it's going to grow.

[00:15:44] Ashley: That's not good enough for me. So I want to know. I want to know how you know, how they grow. What sort of conditions they like. How to get the seeds, how to propagate them. All that detailed information. And I've It's taken me, it's taken me quite a few years to gain enough, enough knowledge about each plant to actually start writing writing the blog.

[00:16:07] Ashley: But I, anyway, I just want to share that information with other people and 

[00:16:12] Ashley: Yeah, I do intend to write one. Yes. I do intend to write one. Yeah. I think that 

[00:16:20] Susan Dye: The blog now has a lot of information on it, so we're trying to think about, there's a little menu option called index, and that takes you to the key plants, the ones we've been talking about, you can go from naturesrainbow.

[00:16:31] Susan Dye: co. uk, and then just click on index, and you find, the top plants we've been talking about, the Madder of the World, the Japanese indigo we also grow, we love that plant. And that just is a helpful start because there's so much on there now that you could just spend the whole winter reading the articles about it.

[00:16:49] Roz Chandler: I can think of worse things to do. 

[00:16:50] Susan Dye: Yeah we love the photography as well and there's, Yeah, so it's, and we've got friends and collaborators all around the world now from the blog, so it's really super. 

[00:17:00] Ashley: The plants are absolutely fascinating, we talked a little bit about woad and Japanese indigo.

[00:17:05] Ashley: These are the two main plants that we grow that produce indigo. Indigo dye. There are many other plants around the world that also produce indigo dye, and basically, that is the only blue that you can get from plants. There is no, there is one or two other rare plants around the world which do produce blue substances, but there's a very few that can actually be used.

[00:17:29] Ashley: So we use, it's indigo and the There are so many different plants and they're all completely unrelated to each other but they all produce this indigo dye. So woad is totally unrelated to Japanese indigo for instance and and, but Japanese indigo is a is a knotweed, it's a knotweed, persicaria.

[00:17:50] Ashley: Now there are a number of persicaria plants that are native to the UK. And our favorite, there are quite a few persicaria species that are grown by gardeners. But they don't produce any indigo at all. It's only Japanese indigo that actually produces the indigo. Even though the plants look fairly similar to each other, so it's quite remarkable.

[00:18:14] Ashley: I find it quite remarkable that some plants produce all this dye and other closely related plants produce nothing at all. 

[00:18:22] Susan Dye: And you close your, turn your back for a minute and actually we've planted another native persicaria just so we can just double, triple check. So yeah. And 

[00:18:31] Roz Chandler: you need a lot of plants, presumably, to make the 

[00:18:35] Ashley: dye.

[00:18:35] Ashley: It varies. Things like dahlia plants dahlia flowers do produce a lot of dye and dye is chamomile and you can dye, a substantial amount of material with only a small amount of plant the rule of thumb is, 

[00:18:49] Susan Dye: If you dry the flowers, the rule of thumb is you need an equal weight of dried flowers.

[00:18:54] Susan Dye: for the thing you want to dye. So that just gives you a rough idea. And generally speaking, when you move from fresh to dried the weight drops by what, with flour as a factor of, oh, 

[00:19:04] Ashley: about six, 

[00:19:06] Susan Dye: roughly. And with the madder you, the root is concentrated, so you need less.

[00:19:10] Susan Dye: You could generally work with 50 percent or a quarter of the weight of madder. to the thing you want to dye. And if you want a pastel pale color, even less. So the matter is concentrated. And with the indigo, we, our unit of measurement is a supermarket bag crammed full of fresh leaves actually. And we know how much, we know how much that turns into in terms of, 

[00:19:32] Ashley: Somewhere between one and two kilos of leaves.

[00:19:36] Ashley: And that will produce enough indigo to dye a garment or maybe two garments. 

[00:19:42] Susan Dye: A blouse maybe. A blouse, a pale to mid blue. But if you want the deep Japanese blues, those really deep near black, navy, navy and blacks, then you need a lot of dips and you need a lot of concentrated indigo.

[00:19:54] Roz Chandler: Wow. So what next for you? 

[00:19:57] Susan Dye: Besides the book, yeah, that's a good question. We'll be preparing all of our self saved seed now to get, so there's seasonal things we always do, but one of them is now we're going to preparing all the seed for selling next season. So we do a small amount of seed selling.

[00:20:11] Susan Dye: We've got a lot of matter to dig up, haven't we? We've always got matter to dig up because it's quite a vigorous plant. We're looking at over lockdown, when we couldn't do face to face workshops, we started some mentoring, online mentoring for people who wanted to set up a dye garden. And that's really enjoyable.

[00:20:27] Susan Dye: And we're thinking about extending that to doing some online sort of taught modules. So people can really be given the benefit of, careful step by step instruction for some of the key, both the horticultural and the plant dying state processes that we do. And we also recently as it became easier the place where we teach our workshops has now got an outdoor classroom, so we can teach outdoors, which is fantastic.

[00:20:53] Susan Dye: It's a wonderful community garden in Hitchin. And We've also started, as well as workshops, which are usually a day or two days and quite intense and we pack in a lot of information in our workshops. We're also just found that we've enjoyed doing garden visits. So having a day when we have three sort of groups come, small groups, it's all small because everything is, it's a very but having small groups come and just see the garden and wander around and we talk to them about the plants and they get a chance to see them and see their habit.

[00:21:21] Susan Dye: And those have been really enjoyable and we've done them for different types of groups as well. So I think we'll probably be doing, setting up, putting up a program for garden visits for next year. Starting from when they start. Words start to look interesting in April onwards really.

[00:21:35] Roz Chandler: So have you set your course structure for next year, your workshop? So they're on your website? 

[00:21:39] Susan Dye: Not completely, they're not at the moment. They will be soon and we're due to send out another newsletter, so you can sign up to get all of the, to the first view on our website. So there's a, In the shop page, which is where the seeds will normally be, but also workshops you can follow the link to sign up to our work newsletter.

[00:21:57] Susan Dye: And we're collaborating with the botanical printer at the moment to offer some really fun botanical printing workshops. And we're meeting with her next weekend to sit down and come up with the proper program of dates. So we'll work around the collaboration with Louise and then fit everything else in around it, really.

[00:22:14] Susan Dye: But Yeah, hopefully there'll be lots of things. We time it according to when the plants are ready to work with during the year. So the indigo and woad is always from June onwards. And it's yeah, middle of June onwards through until about now before the first frosts arrive.

[00:22:29] Susan Dye: That's when we can be working with fresh materials. Yeah, same as us really, yeah. Over the winter we're just drying lots and lots of things. The house is full of miscellaneous things that are drying and seeds are preparing and things like that. 

[00:22:43] Roz Chandler: So how do people find out about you at Nature's Rainbow?

[00:22:45] Roz Chandler: Is it naturesrainbow. co. uk? 

[00:22:47] Susan Dye: Yep, that's the website and we're on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and all the links are on the website. Ashley does the Facebook and Twitter and I do the Instagram, so you get two slightly different views of what we're up to. 

[00:22:59] Ashley: And most people are in, are on Facebook Instagram, aren't they?

[00:23:04] Ashley: I don't know, there's a lot on both, 

[00:23:05] Susan Dye: but there's a lot of Q& A, there's some wonderful Facebook groups out there, which, which you know, Ashley's active on. So there's always a fantastic community offering, advice and tips and things in real time. That's brilliant. 

[00:23:17] Roz Chandler: I'd like to thank you very much for joining us tonight.

[00:23:19] Roz Chandler: And those who haven't been able to join us tonight, I know the time is quite difficult for some, then do come back and say hashtag replay and tell us what you think and ask lots of questions. And I can always pass those questions on to Susan and Ashley. In the meantime, I will definitely be doing a course and I will have a little die garden And you need to let me know when your seeds are available.

[00:23:41] Susan Dye: Okay. 

[00:23:43] Roz Chandler: I love learning new things. I don't know anything about it and always prepared to give it a go. 

[00:23:48] Susan Dye: It's been absolutely brilliant being asked to be on Roz and it's great to be introduced to all the great things you're doing as well. So thank you very much for having us. 

[00:23:55] Roz Chandler: Thank you. I'll see you both soon in real life.

[00:23:58] Roz Chandler: Great. Okay. Look forward to it. Bye.