Elderberry

Ok, so I know I just said that Amaranth was my favorite plant, but now it's Elderberry. With medicinal, edible, and dye properties it is a winner!

here are some images from a recent dye experiment. this was with the leftover berries from my sister's Elderberry Cordial.

I put about 2 cups of elderberry mush with water and brought to a boil. I then added a few pieces of handwoven nettle fabric and some silk-wool scraps. I boiled for 1 hour solid. Then, I turned off the heat, covered and let sit over night. In the morning I removed my fabric, rinsed and enjoyed the gorgeous wine-color!!

The slight difference between the elderberry dyed nettle (left) and natural (right)
I loved this two tone effect on the wool silk!

J'adore Amaranth

A Rose and an Amaranth blossomed side by side in a garden,
and the Amaranth said to her neighbour,
"How I envy you your beauty and your sweet scent!
No wonder you are such a universal favourite."
But the Rose replied with a shade of sadness in her voice,
"Ah, my dear friend, I bloom but for a time:
my petals soon wither and fall, and then I die.
But your flowers never fade, even if they are cut;
for they are everlasting." ---- From Aesop's Fables


I think amaranth is one of my favorite plants. In permaculture we talk alot about stacking functions and the amaranth is truly a multi-functional plant indeed. You can use the flowers to make a gorgeous dye. You can grind up the seeds make plant based paints. You can eat the highly nutritious grains. You can eat the highly nutritious leaves. The plant is so gorgeous it makes your eyes hurt. It can be a cut flower. Time go to plant some amaranth in my garden.

amorphophallus diversion

Lawsonia inermis

all of these beautiful images by paige green photography. thank you paige!!

henna or mehendi or maradhani is the dye from the plant Lawsonia inermis. The plant is native to Northern Africa, Southern Asia and parts of Australasia. We used to have a tree in my grandparents house in Chennai. The leaves are dried and powdered then mixed with water and sometimes eucalyptus oil to form a paste. The paste is then applied to the skin. When dry a mixture of sugar and lemon is applied to avoid the henna from chipping off. You can keep henna on any where from 30 minutes to overnight. For the wedding I kept mine on over night. It was the darkest 36 hours after application. It is such a beautiful art with rich designs from many cultures. The plant can also be used to dye clothing.

wedding detour

imogen the florist. we ordered bunches of local, organic wildflowers from the nearby full belly farms. imogen did a beautiful job assembling them into the centerpieces. 

zarah and valentina hanging up the handmade love flags that jaia and i stitched from beautiful sari fabric scraps and turmeric dyed bamboo fabric

meredith's lovely calligraphy on the name cards. when i was in india in february i got the name cards printed on handmade jute paper and the beautiful little bejeweled boxes from a local handicrafts shoppe.

hi friends, if any of you are out there. i'm going to put up a series of photos from the recent wedding! i can't help but. it was a beautiful weekend of events. i know when i was out looking for ideas and people's experience there was very little in they way of merging south indian ritual and tradition with local, organic, DIY. so here's my attempt. i'm starting with a few set-up images from our saturday pre-wedding dinner and reception at the headlands center for the arts in marin. it is a beautiful historic building, with lots of charm. we got there early morning and my "swat team" of friends and family helped with all the set up. 

inspiration

they just don't make stamps like they used to.

not that i have time for a new hobby, but i am simply in love with these vintages botanical stamps. they are so beautiful, have botanical names, and some even have messages like " plant for a more beautiful america." i got these from Verde Studio on etsy.

fibers & dyes

look at these gorgeous colors from nature! they were made by students of Sasha Duerr Fossel's Soil to Studio Class, Garden volunteer Cynthia Dakopolos and yours truly. I am so inspired by the depth and range of each one. The photos don't do justice, so please come visit the fiber & dye exhibit at the UC Botanical Garden.

http://botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu/root_images/programs/winter_10/fiber_dye.html

back to basics

I started this blog to explore the wonderful/essential relationship we have with plants in our daily lives. And I have been a very bad blogger. So here's my public decree of commitment to keeping up this blog! There's surely no lack of beautiful things to post!

a tree grows in richmond

flowers & fruits
the garden

I am really proud to be a part of an amazing project at Verde school in Richmond. The docents of the UC Botanical Garden have been working with this school, to give our tours & programs in their amazingly diverse and thriving school garden. The school, has little money for field trips, but they are a culturally rich school and with parent and grandparent volunteers in the garden they have a wonderful array of edibles, medicinals and native plants. I was fortunate enough to come along with the docents to watch them present our "grocery store botany" program to the 1st graders at Verde. Here are a few images from their garden.

inspiration: dio de los muertos

fall festival at ardenwood farm

treasures from the spanish table

i recently went over to the spanish table in berkeley and was amazed by what treasures they have. it is brightly colored with everything from cookbooks to saffron, white wine to paella pans, this is definitely a goto place for the rare and special items you might need in your pantry.

i bought some TAZA organic guajillo chili chocolate-- perfect for baking, hot chocolate or for cooking. it comes in this pretty disc and is stoneground in small batches somerville, mass so i couldn't resist.

my second treasure was some marcona almonds in rosemary honey.

hapazome = brilliant

i recently learned about something called "hapazome" or flower pounding. a couple of weekends ago, the ecological artist rebecca burgess came to the uc botanical garden to teach a wonderful day long workshop on native plant dyes. little did we know that we'd leave knowing all that and more! i was enchanted with hapazote. the amazing textile artist india flint apparently coined the term. it is a way of using fresh flowers and immediately extracting the pigments and sealing them into our clothes or other fabrics. it was so easy, so gratifying and so beautiful.

you begin by laying down your piece of fabric. we used t-shirt scraps. then you lay fresh flower petals on the cloth as you'd like. we used a few such as nasturtium, pansy, cosmos.

then you lay another piece of cloth over the flowers-- if your using a t-shirt or big piece of fabric you can simply fold over the cloth. we then sprayed the fabric with water and soda ash or wood ash mixed in a spray bottle. when the cloth is saturated you can begin pounding:

my favorite thing about it is this: the flowers fade, but then, once they do you can keep pounding new flowers into your cloths or sheets or any fabrics to create these beautiful collages of your history and the flowers you've come across. the fabrics become histories of our lives and beautiful stories of our natural world. i LOVE it! thank you rebecca for teaching me this beautiful art and to your wonderful brother michael who took this great photos.

go native!

ok, i know i haven't blogged in a while, it's all because my camera was kidnapped to halifax and without a camera i feel lost. words?! i'm not a good writer! my blog is about plants plants don't talk and i don't have to talk to them to enjoy them.

nonetheless. now that i am without a camera i will attempt to catch you up on some happenings... and borrow a photo from the botanical garden.

just yesterday i was at the botanical garden learning all about butterfly friendly plants. yes, it's true, many of the host plants for butterflies tend to be on the weedy and even invasive side. a perfect example is fennel. fennel came to california from asia and spread to become one of the more weedy of the weedy. fennel is now the favorite host plant of the anise swallowtail butterfly. well interestingly enough there is a california native host plant and it is called Yampah (Perideridia kellogii). Not only is Yampah an important food source for the anise swallowtail, but it was also an important food source for California Native Peoples.

And to make matters best, we do sell Perideridia sp. at the Botanical Garden-- it's a plant rarely found in nurseries.

papermaking with papyrus

more from the green gala- these ones by david gilbert

OCELOT: hand dyed using itajime shibori technique in San Francisco

Jonathan David Baker's multi-directionally pleated dress made with seaweed and organic cotton, tux jacket made with recycled nylon and recycled tire rubber

TINC: designed by Savannah Knoop made with sea weed and wood pulp, peace silk, and organic cotton canvas

ashley helvey's d felted organic wool dress from a predator friendly farm

the moon: lace pillow lava dress: vintage slip, lace bits, silk and cotton handkerchiefs, napkins and doilies. annatto dyed silk shirts over dyed with black walnut hull