Dye Project: Blackberry Canes & Leaves

I harvested a renegade California Blackberry (a.k.a., Pacific Blackberry) from a front planter in the new landscape, and decided to try using it for a dye source. According to information on the internet, the cane and leaves yield a yellow dye. 

I cut the cane and leaves into a plastic bucket, and covered them with water to soak overnight. This rinses away dust and small insects. The plant material weighed 680 grams, or 24 ounces.

Blackberry cane and leaves (Rubus ursinus)

For this project, I used two cotton dish towels that had been prepared as described in Preparing your Fabric (Scour, Mordant, Brighten). The towels had been scoured, mordanted with oak gallnut extract, and brightened with alum and soda ash. The weight of fabric (WOF) was 154 grams, or 5.4 ounces. The WOF% was 442% for the 680 grams of canes and leaves.

Extract the Dye

First, extract the dye from the plant material. I allowed several days for this process, but you can speed up the process for each step if you prefer.

After soaking the plant material in clean water, strain off the dirty water using a sieve and place the clean cane and leaves in the dye pot. Pour boiling water over the plant material to cover, and let the mixture steep overnight (or for at least 8 hours). It smells like an herbal tea.

Steep the cane and leaves in boiling water overnight

Bring the mixture to about 180 degrees and let simmer for an hour. Try to maintain the simmer, without exceeding 180 degrees. Inexplicably, setting my electric burner to 195 degrees seems to maintain the temperature perfectly, just under 180 degrees.

Simmer for about an hour

After an hour, let the liquid cool slightly and then strain it through a sieve into a bucket or dye pot. Discard the plant material. The dye bath is a brownish green. 

Strain the plant material from the dye liquid

Dye the Fabric

Next, dye your prepared fabric in the extracted dye. In a bucket, soak the prepared fabric in water for 30 minutes; this makes it easier for the fabric to absorb the dye. In the dye pot, add four teaspoons of alum to the dye bath and bring the temperature back up to a simmer.

Simmer the prepared fabric in the dye bath

When the dye is simmering, squeeze excess water from the fabric and add it to the dye bath. Let the dye bath simmer at around 180 degrees for an hour. Stir the fabric periodically to distribute the dye evenly. Optionally you can test the pH of the dye bath (mine had a pH of 2, which is quite acidic). Remove the dye pot from the heat, and leave the towels in the bath to steep overnight (or for a few hours if you prefer). 

Squeeze out the fabric

Rinse the fabric until the water runs clear

Squeeze out excess dye, rinse the fabric, and then run it through the washing machine without detergent and hang to dry. 

Hang to dry

Wait two weeks to let the dye set, and then wash the fabric with a mild textile soap [like Synthropol or Professional Textile Detergent (a.k.a., Dharma Dyer's Detergent)] and hang it to dry. The resulting color is a clear yellow.

Blackberry canes and leaves produce a clear yellow

Learn More:

• Plant Dyeing with Blackberry Canes & Leaves - this article was inspiration for my project.
• Plant Dyeing with Blackberries - I book marked this article, but haven't tried it yet.

Landscaping: One Year Report

Today we're celebrating the one year anniversary of our new landscape! It's a good time to take stock and confirm that the garden is growing and thriving. According to Rebecca Kolls of Rebecca's Garden, in the first year perennials sleep, the second year they creep, and the third year they leap. In this post I'm providing a one-year report, comparing against Landscaping: Six Month Report and Landscaping: Finished.

The heuchera and grasses continue to thrive (without the summer weeds)

In November we contracted a monthly landscaping maintenance service. We had let the garden grow naturally for the first six months, so it was quite overgrown when I returned from Alaska in October. We could identify most plants from the planting schedule, but didn't know whether others were weeds or plants from a  wild flower mix of annuals. We decided to hire professionals to get the yard back on track. They do a great job, and I've been learning from them. The garden is fairly low maintenance (once you know what is required), so in time we may switch to a quarterly service and do more of the weeding and grooming ourselves.

The succulent rock garden is filling in

The landscape was designed as a wildlife garden with keystone plants for food and shelter. We added a Bird Buddy bird feeder (with camera), and continue to provide a hummingbird feeder in the side yard and a terracotta bird bath with fresh water daily. We get many visitors to all three. We've also had visiting deer, coyote, turkey, skunk, and neighborhood cats (who are very interested in our bird visitors).

California poppies and grasses line the path to the junipers 

The grass clumps have gained in size (they were started as spindly plugs last spring, and cut back in the winter). The California poppy are much larger this year and back in bloom (several bloomed throughout the winter)! A few pink Clarkia continue to bloom as well. I miss our big legacy trees, but it is exciting to see a couple of small Japanese maples that are thriving and just about to leaf out. The remaining trees (oak, liquid amber, prunus, and juniper) seem to be enjoying more room and the boost of irrigation water plus winter rains. 

The grass mounds by the steps to the lower yard are more established

The "shrub fence" is still a distant dream, but most of the new shrubs are still thriving (we did lose several, so they'll need to be replanted after we investigate why they died). When Mako and Dakota the Huskies came to live with us last year, we wondered if we should rethink the fence at some point. Not in the budget at this time, but worth thinking about in case a new Husky joins our family! 

The shrubs to the right of the gate are slightly taller!

The shrubs by the utilitarian gate are still pretty small (you can almost see them to the right of the gate and left of the tree). They have put on a little height and the two deciduous shrubs have leafed out. All three should eventually provide a privacy screen for the downstairs courtyard. The fall and winter leaves and berries have been cleaned up and moved to the compost bin.

The plants along the front walk have really filled in!

After reviewing the new landscape, I am satisfied about the progress made over the last year. Most of the original plants are still alive, and are growing and thriving. So far we haven't taken steps to make changes or additions to the garden, preferring instead to get to know what we have and how to care for it. But we've been talking about a few projects, such as planting dwarf maple trees in containers and adding some plants to the rock garden. I still want to plant the raised bed with dye plants or herbs, and like the idea of planting some "crops" here and there (it was so much fun to harvest cherry tomatoes in February). I'm also content to enjoy the current garden as perennials move into the "creep" stage of their development!

Plant Hunters: Edith Van Allen Murphey

More plant hunters! This year I'm focusing on women collectors in the Western United States. Our first report is about the self-taught ethnobotanist, Edith Van Allen Murphy (1879-1968), who worked in the Intermountain National Forest lands within Utah, Nevada, western Wyoming, and southern Idaho; and later in California. I first learned about Ms. Murphey while reading Lester Rountree's Hardy Californians (see Plant Hunters: Lester Rountree). In the forward, Judith Larner Lowry describes Murphey as a seed-gathering woman who was contemporaneous with Rowntree, and collected in Mendocino County in California.

Edith Van Allen-Murphey (Sojourn Magazine Winter 96-97)

Edith Van Allen was born in 1879 in New York state. She attended Melvil Dewey's library school at Albany, New York (Dewey invented the Dewey Decimal system of library classification). In 1902 she was recruited to catalog rare books for the University of California at Berkeley and moved across country. In around 1903, failing eyesight prevented her from continuing the work. She moved to the redwoods near Sherwood, just north of Willits, to homestead. She married a neighboring homesteader but divorced two years later. During this time she learned how to live off the land from nearby Pomo natives.

Over the next 25 years, she married two more ranchers, Sanford Lee Redwine of Round Valley and then Will Murphey of Covelo. Both marriages were happy, but left her a widow. While living on these primitive California ranches, she fell in love with Mendocino and developed a passion for rare native flowers. Between chores, she collected specimens, and corresponded with botanist Carl Purdy (1861-1945) of Ukiah, sending them to him for identification and learning from his responses. In 1906, Mrs. Phoebe Hearst commissioned her to collect the best of Northern California Indian basketry for the University of California. In 1925 her third husband, Will Murphey, died and Murphey sold their ranch.

Sam Young (Hayfork Wintu), Edith Van Allen Murphey, and Lucy Young (Lassik)

Murphey realized she was free to follow her passion for plants. From 1925 to 1935 she worked for United States Bureau of Indian Affairs. Their primary interest was to identify and eliminate stock-poisoning plants on Indian cattle and sheep ranges. During this time she lived and worked with eleven Indian tribes gathering data, as the United States Indian Service's only range botanist. The contacts that Ms. Murphey made during her research for the BIA, enabled her to document plant use by indigenous people groups throughout the Intermountain region and the West, and to publish Indian Uses of Native Plants. 

Detail from the Mendocino County History Mural, painted by Judy Pruden
Left to right: Carl Purdy, Sam Young, Edith Murphey, and Lucy Young

In 1927, at the age of 48, she headed to the Mendocino high country in hopes of being a plant collector for John Purdy, who collected and sold California seeds and bulbs all over the world. He refused to hire a woman as a plant collector, but hired her as a cook instead. She was still able to collect plant specimens from spring through fall, and met many visiting botanists during her time with Purdy. From 1935 until her death in 1968, she spent her days in Covelo, California advocating for both native Americans and the amazing biodiversity of California's plants. Artist Judy Pruden included Carl Purdy, Sam Young, Edith Van Allen Murphey, and Lucy Young as botanists on the Mendocino County History Mural, in Ukiah, California.

Learn More

• Edith Van Allen Murphey, Sojourn Magazine Premier Issue, Winter 1996-1997. Written by Liz Helenchild, using original wording by Ms. Murphey where possible. https://creation-designs.com/gracemillennium/sojourn/premiere/html/ed_murphey.html

• Edith Van Allen Murphey Papers, University of Nevada, Reno (microfilm; the originals are in Covelo, California). https://archive.library.unr.edu/public/repositories/2/resources/139
• Indian Uses of Native Plants. Edith Van Allen Murphey (Meyerbooks, Illinois, 1990; and Mendocino County Historical Society, 1958, 1987). Ethnobotanical uses of native plants by indigenous people of the Intermountain area. https://www.amazon.com/Indian-Native-Plants-Edith-Murphey/dp/0916638154

• Hardy Californians, Lester Rowntree (University of California Press, Berkeley, 2006). The forward includes the article, "Lester Rowntree's Horticultural Legacy", by Judith Lowry. On page lxvii, Lowry writes that plant collecting contemporaries Rowntree, Edith Van Allen Murphey, and Willis Linn Jepson loved the freedom and adventure of the automobile while plant collecting. She also notes that Murphey longed to meet Rowntree. https://www.amazon.com/Hardy-Californians-Womans-Native-Plants/dp/0520250516/

• The Lily Man of Ukiah, NYBG LuEsther T. Mertz Library, Plant & Research Guides, Nursery and Seed Catalogs: Carl Purdy and the Bulbs and Wild Flowers of California. Explores the nursery catalogs and professional career of Carl Purdy, who saw and understood the flora of California with an unmatched acuity. Edith Van Allen Murphey served as apprentice and cook for Purdy. https://libguides.nybg.org/c.php?g=655017&p=4597876

Note: search this article for "Edith Murphey: A disciple of Carl Purdy". The side bar article provides more information about Ms. Murphey and her life experiences.

• Lucy Young, Round Valley, podcast: Parts 1 - 7. KZYX Mendocino County Remembered, read by Linda Pack. The saga of a 10-year old Wailaki Indian girl in 1862 who fled from soldiers and from white men who trafficked in Indian children. In 1939, when Lucy was in her 90s, she told her story to her friend and neighbor in Covelo, the ethnobotanist Edith Van Allen Murphey. Lucy Young wanted the truth to be told. https://feeds.transistor.fm/kzyx-mendocino-county-remembered (search for "Lucy Young").

• Mendocino County Historical Mural, painted by Judy Pruden. This mural runs the length of an entire city block on the north wall of the Ukiah Valley Conference Center in downtown Ukiah, California. Panel 25 is devoted to Ukiah botanist and horticulturist Carl Purdy, Covelo ethnobotanist Edith Van Allen Murphey, and Native botanical experts Lucy Young (Lassik) and her husband Sam Young (Hayfork Wintu). https://historymural.com/sections/six/remembrance/#botanists