The Mother Woad

I can blame my dear friend Maria Kittler for getting me hooked on natural dyeing. She signed us up for a workshop at Edge of the Woods nursery, and then planted a dye garden for me in her back yard! With only a 4’ x 4’ raised bed, we knew we had to be strategic, and only plant the absolute best dye plants. Research showed that Woad (blue) madder (red) and Weld (yellow) were the absolute triple crown of permanent dye plants.  They were used from antiquity and extensively in the middle ages etc. For example the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cloisters in NYC featured fiber dyed from all three (woad, madder & weld); roughly 600 years later, the woad in particular has held its color amazingly well. There are countless examples I could have given going back to ancient Egypt, but many of us are familiar with the Unicorn Tapestries so I decided to use them as an example.

Left-me with woad flowers from Marla's garden, leaves stripped to use in dye pot, May 2020. Right, Marla June 2022 with woad from the same garden plot.

Woad is a biennial-supposedly. Also supposedly, its best harvested to dye with in the first year and flowers in the second year. Yes, supposedly. I got much better woad dye results for some reason (there could be many reasons) from plants that were in full bloom. In the photo above left, you can see I stripped off the leaves for the dye pot. As for it being a biennial, I would swear there are woad plants in Marla’s garden that just didn’t die in winter and have lasted 4 years. On literally the first day of the residency, I pulled many a weed, and planted some seeds Marla had saved from a previous year. I asked Marla to let her plants go to seed so I could harvest the seeds to plant out at the East 40. It’s amazing how well the woad complied with my request! The madder has kind of choked out the woad, so that only maybe 25% of the 4’ x 4’ plot is woad at this point.

Woad loves growing back after getting cut right down to the ground. It will do that over and over the same year, it’s almost a year-round green vigorous grower in this climate. So I cut down all the woad in her bed, (photo above left shows it lying on the grass after I harvested it) and then plucked all the leaves for dye material and all the seeds for planting, photo above right.

Even though I’m generally a failure at growing anything from seed, even that little bit of woad I sowed the first day has provided some plants. I call them my woad babies, and have been tucking them in to bed each night. Seriously though, I have been getting rid of all the weeds around them and watering them as needed. Today I generously seeded around the woad babies, and on the other side of the bed where I didn’t have plants yet. The hope is, that when I do the dye workshop in September, that the class will get to help me pick the woad, and that we can do a nice big dye pot with it. The active ingredient, so to speak in woad is indigotin, the same as in indigo. Admittedly woad has less indigotin than indigo, but as it was what my ancestors used and grows well in this climate, it has somehow captured my imagination. Also, I got some delicate bright blues from it that so far I have not been able to get with indigo, which does not like this climate. So there. Go woad!

My woad babies at the NCC East 40, June 28, 2022

Swatches from fabrics I dyed in 2020. From the leaves I took off of the bunch of woad flowers I'm holding in the photo top left in this post.