Dye garden promotes natural colors to reduce pollution

Textile Center’s natural dyeing and cultivating gardens is available to the public and reduces the use of synthetic dyeing

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By Atra Mohamed / The Hubbard School

In a hobby dominated by synthetic dyes, Textile Center on University Avenue in Stadium Village is promoting a more natural, environmentally conscious way to color the world.

Textile Center’s mission is to promote fiber art through education, workshops and exhibits. Part of that mission is highlighting natural dyeing through its natural dye plant garden open to the public. 

The volunteer-run garden houses plants used for natural dyes from mid-May to mid-September. Colorful plants fill the ground, including indigo, zinnia, bee balm and dyer’s madder. 

Chloe Chang, Textile Center’s education associate, said some plants take up to five years before they are ready to harvest, while others can be harvested multiple times in a season.

Chang said the usual methods of dyeing fabrics involve many processes and people. Sometimes, these processes are not human-friendly.

For example, Chang said dye-making jobs can be exploitative. The chemicals used are not always safe for human health and pollute the environment.

Often, people buy beautifully colored clothes from the market without knowing the work and the human suffering that went into those creations, Chang said. 

Chang demonstrated natural dying through a process called flower pounding. She picked up an array of flowers from the garden, spread them on a white hand towel and pounded them until they dissolved. The end result was a bright, multicolored design on the towel.

For a plant like madder, roots must be harvested when using them for dyeing to start the growing process again to get a brand-new plant, Chang said.

Erin Husted, Textile Center detail and merchandising manager, said promoting and cultivating dyeing gardens is something at the forefront of reducing pollution.

“We also use invasive plants to make the most out of nature,” Husted said. 

Textile Center also has a dye lab to process the plants into dyes for fiber art.

“The plant dyeing process is all about timing, such as how long you cook the plants and how long you leave the fabric in the dye,” Husted said.

The center runs an after-school program geared toward fiber art. Children harvest plants and undergo the dyeing process.

“To us, natural dyeing is another way of grounding ourselves into nature and also of relating to the people who do this work in a much husher environment,” Chang said.