Excellent dye

Last weekend djjo and I tried two more dyes from natural materials obtained locally. One of these experiments produced our most exciting results so far.

First we used black locust pods, gathered on Queen Street Hill in Guelph, with tin mordant. This produced a light tan colour, nice but unremarkable.

Next we used mountain ash leaves cut from a small tree that leans over the cottage (I spent a little while on the roof with pruning shears). Nancy J. McGuffin's Dye Plants of Ontario promised "a rich golden copper" from copper mordant and an ammonia rinse, and that's what we obtained. After the first bath there was still plenty of colour in the water, so we added more mordant and dyed a second batch of fibre. Surprisingly, this produced just as strong colours.

The results with silk and silk/wool were especially exciting. Unfortunately the photos don't do them justice.

Shown first are three skeins of Fabel superwash (nylon/wool), for comparison: first the black locust (top), then the mountain ash first bath, and mountain ash second bath. The second photo shows everything we dyed, but I'm too lazy to go into a thorough description.

I'm so excited about the mountain ash that I would like to use it to dye enough yarn to make a sweater someday.

Garden angel

As Dorothy says in The Wizard of Oz, "The next time I go looking for my heart's desire, I won't look any further than my own backyard; if it's not there, then I never really lost it to begin with." There are many satisfactions for the traveling naturalist, but Barry Lopez has written that the deepest understanding comes from staying in one place, getting to know it in every kind of light, weather and season. Perhaps this also relates to the genius loci, the spirit that indwells a particular garden or rural space.

This morning as I stepped out for my walk, the little front door garden captured and drew me in. I spent the next 20 minutes in rapt attention to flowers and insects, and never stepped beyond the stream of traffic, highway 7, which separates my house from the Eramosa River. It's nice to think that I've awakened a besieged, encrypted spirit, and that it in turn has begun weaving enchantments that will draw me deeper into the web of life.

I'm entranced by the minute scarlet pimpernel, Anagallis arvensis. It appeared when I gardened this same space years ago. It had gone into hiding through the hard years since, but now offers itself again, trailing from beneath the alyssum. It's one of the few weeds (and warm-coloured flowers) I allow to grow here, so in fact it isn't a weed anymore. Tiny, tenacious and colourful, it exemplifies qualities of the cultivated plants I chose. Perhaps it is my garden angel.

This fly seems fascinated with the furry leaves of Thymus pseudolanuginosis (woolly thyme), another plant I adore.