Our dye garden is turning four years old, and we’re celebrating with an art exhibit. This summer, art created using plants grown here at Allen Centennial Garden are being featured in the Home Grown exhibit alongside other local artists at the Madison Textile Art Center. We hope you will stop by to see them in person, but here is a peak behind the scenes of learning alongside dye plants over the past few years. 

What began as a plant list created with our colleagues at the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection here on campus has become a rewarding avenue for our interns to develop a host of plant and non-plant skills, a popular topic for workshops and classes, and an opportunity for Allen Centennial Garden to cultivate more relationships within the Madison community.

We offered our first dyeing workshop in 2023. This class was developed, led, and taught by our intern Kat, who left behind a great blog post and a dye program that future interns could build on. To provide context, imagine that you just graduated, had never dyed fabric, let alone dyeing fabric with plants, and you had less than two months before you’d be presenting as an expert to adults. Kat did it with grace. We had just one mishap at that session, our walnut pot wasn’t potent enough to give a good color change. Kat proved her expertise by troubleshooting with iron mordant. She knew and used this treatment to darken the samples and provide more depth of color.

The following season, we began thinking about how visitors on a student tour or at a workshop would be able to interact with the different plants. Pearl, a landscape architect student and intern, created a design for the space that allowed nearly all of the different types of plants to be reachable from the edge of the path. This was especially important for student tours where we have students gather flowers and then smash their colors into fabric. Furthermore, by looking at how much space was given to each plant, we answered an ongoing question – how much of a plant, and how much space, do you need to make a strong pot of dye? Not as much as you’d think. Our dye garden is around 275 sq ft, smaller than many community garden plots. Each dye plant may only grow in a few dozen square feet, yet in the case of Japanese Indigo (blue), or Coreopsis (organgy brown), make three to five dye pots in a season.

In 2024, we had a fun idea for our Harvest Festival. Let’s make a quilt out of plant dyed swatches and ask people to decorate different colors based on a question. That year, we asked how many generations ago did your family farm? Depending on the answer, participants selected a different color swatch.

The responses were: 

• “I am a farmer” – blue (indigo), 
• “One generation” –  yellow (marigold)
• “Two generations” – orange (coreopsis), and
• “Three or more” –  brown (walnut)

They were asked to decorate their square by thinking about their family’s harvest traditions. As one might expect, there were a lot of walnut squares as statistics show that only one or two percent of our nation is farmers. 

Many of these swatches were dyed by Margaux, who mastered mordanting at the 5 gallon bucket scale. In the process, she also dyed a huge kernza banner to help people understand the importance of roots, and treated enough tote bags for several summers worth of future dyeing. 

In 2025, we asked Harvest Festival participants to choose a fabric swatch based on the climate where they grew up. 

The map included five categories: 

• cold – blue (indigo)
• temperate – yellow (marigold)
• tropical – green (marigold and indigo)
• arid – red (madder)
• polar/alpine – purple (madder and dahlia) (No one picked this one.)

In this case, cold meant any climate that regularly receives snow, so as you can imagine, more than half of the participants were feeling blue as midwest natives. As they decorated their squares, 2025 participants were asked to consider how local nature influenced their traditions. 

The past year our programs team worked to deepen our plant dye knowledge by designing an embroidery class and developing ways to teach some basic science that is important to dyeing. If you want to embroider with plant dyed skeins you may find yourself blessed with abundance in yellows and browns. Other shades like purple, or green are more difficult to come by. Lila completed over twenty pots to have enough colors for her class. What we learned about embroidery floss is that small skeins of fiber don’t take a lot of plant material to test. So she motored through the classics – weld, indigo, cosmo, coreopsis, madder, cherry – and she tested the harder to work with fraction like prickly pear, pincushion, and woad. There were pots that didn’t work, but more that did. Using this survey approach we also created a flower pounding banner which helped us learn more about what unique colors are available during different times of the year and a visual aid for how certain colors like the red in Amaranth simply wash out. These samples helped us tell better stories about what was happening in the plant and in the dye pot, while also helping us consider other ways to modify our color palette via pH changes and also by using different treatments like iron or copper.

Where does that put us? There are five interns out in the wild who know how to use plants as nature educators if the need arises. Our dye workshop has improved with a repeatedly revised hand-out because there have been some errors discovered. As a team, we’ve wrestled with a process that starts from seeds and ends with transforming the color of textiles. It’s pretty cool. Finally, we’ve only just scratched the surface. We are excited to continue our work with the Madison Textile Art Center, the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection, the team at the Arboretum who have shared woody plant samples, our future interns, the plants, and beyond. This year, we’re thinking about learning more about tannins, and also, what’s possible when you have the right tools to gather dye flowers at five times the speed…