Lincoln Green: Woad and Goldenrod

​The garden is full of greens.  Grass, leaves and shoots of the plants display an endless number of different varieties of green.  Despite this, to produce a stable (wash fast and light fast) green dye from natural dyes is not a simple matter.  Plants such as Tansy (found in one of the raised beds in the dye garden) reportedly produce an olive green when used with an iron mordant.  But this does not sound like a bright green (and as yet remains untried in the colour garden).

But was not Robin Hood (in some accounts at least) dressed in green?  The solution is Lincoln green[1].   Traditionally Lincoln green involves first dyeing the fabric bright yellow using weld and then over-dyeing it with woad.
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As ever we adapted the method to suit what we had.  So the bright yellow goldenrod fabric we had previously produced was used as the yellow base fabric.  We had stored some of our woad dye from the previous summer.  So resurrected this… and managed to produce a very satisfactory green.   This opens up the possibility of producing a variety of greens.  Yellow is one of the easiest colours to produce in the garden –most of the flowers (even those with bright red petals), tend to produce yellows.  By changing the type of yellow fabric base and then over-dyeing with woad there is great potential for producing all the shades of green found in the garden.


[1] St. Clair, K., 2017. The Secret Lives Of Colour. Penguin Books.