Mushrooms for Color

This year we're exploring the Fungi kingdom, and learning about mushrooms in the garden, great outdoors, kitchen, and dye pot. Our first book is Mushrooms for Color, by Miriam C. Rice (1918-2010) and Dorothy M. Beebee. This book was published by Mad River Press, Inc. (Eureka, California, 1980). Rice was an artist-in-residence at the Mendocino Art Center and became fascinated with dyeing fibers with mushrooms. Beebee is an illustrator and artist, and collaborated with Rice. Together they developed a full-spectrum color wheel of mushroom dyes, including yellows, blues, and reds. They both worked with mycologists, scientists, and enthusiasts from around the world, and became experts themselves, delivering presentations at conferences and leading workshops.

The section on Mushroom Dyes provides basic information about mushrooms, mordants, color, and color fastness, dyeing, and the use of protein fibers (especially wool and silk). The section on Color Index describes the colors that mushrooms produce using different mordants, provides a color index of mushroom dye colors, and documents formulas and dye experiments. The section called Identifying and Classifying Mushrooms for Color was written by mycologist Dr. Susan D. Libonati-Barnes, and provides scientific information about fungi, how to identify mushroom types, parts, and species, how to classify mushrooms, and how to collect them.

The sections Identifying and Classifying Mushrooms for Color and Drawings and Descriptions of Dye mushrooms were written and illustrated by Dorothy M. Beebee, and provide information about the mushrooms and dye results, with notes about the mordants, mushroom parts, and processes used. Beebee uses the knot format that Rice developed as a shorthand to quickly convey this information (for example, no knot means no mordant, one knot means alum mordant, and five knots means iron mordant). The backmatter provides an appendix about Chemistry of Mushroom Dyeing by Erick Sundstrom of Sweden; a Mushroom Index that focuses on dye mushrooms in Northern California; and a bibliography of related publications.

Charming illustration by Beebee, showing mushroom morphology (page 66) 

This is a wonderful reference book for mushroom dyers. It's also conveys how interest in mushroom dyeing started, grew, and spread around the world, all within the last 50 years. Rice and Beebee were passionate about finding out what dye colors mushrooms could produce. They kept records, worked with mycologists and scientists, and shared information. I especially appreciate that the book describes the dye mushrooms found in Northern California, such as Agaricus, Boletus, Cortinarious, Omphalotus, and Polyporus species. The book documents dye outcomes using chrome, tin, and copper as mordants, but informs the reader how poisonous they can be and recommends using salts, alum, cream of tarter, and iron instead. The color photos of dye colors and the detailed mushroom drawings add so much. I highly recommend this book as a resource.

Learn More

Recall that we watched the documentary, Mushrooms for Color, about Rice and her pioneering work extracting dyes from fungi (see Winter Movie 2026).

For information about Beebee and Rice, see the documentary, Try It and See: The story behind the discovery of mushroom dyes.