Gearing up for a spring of planting: Look for dye plants everywhere.

Verbascum Thapsus: Common Mullein & the dye plants underneath your feet.

*Note: I am still fixing a glitch with alternating font sizes in this post. Please forgive!*

The Crane Arts garden with the view of the stables.

Today I met with Nick Kripal, the gardener for the Crane Arts building in Northern Liberties, Philadelphia. The winter's chill still lingered as we took a tour through the Crane's plantings, but the sun was no doubt shining. As could be gathered from the plants with bright green shoots beginning to sprout from dry, dead stalks littering the soil, spring is on its way. Nick Kripal could feel it too: he told me that he would be clearing away a lot of the dead plants to give room for bulbs to sprout this holiday weekend.

As we walked and talked, he pointed out numerous plants that Marafiki Arts had planted in the Crane's garden in years past, and how they had fared over the winter. The unassuming Lady's Bed Straw (galium verum) needs two years before the roots, which can be used as a madder-red, are harvested for dye. This plant's roots contain the same coloring agent as madder plants, but in lower concentrations. You can find this plant all over North America, but you have to know the proper amount of time to give it, what type of conditions it likes (full sun, moist, well-drained, sandy soil), and what it looks like in the first place to have any success in using it as a dye plant. Right now, it looks like straw, which to most people might seem completely useless. I was soon to find out that a lot of plants that look useless to the uneducated eye have much more potential than one would even expect.


As we continued, Nick pointed out a funny little fuzzy green plant that was pretty much growing out of the cracks in the pavement.
 
 

 

Common mullein

Common mullein, he told me. He said that his grandmother told him that pioneers used to use this to make tea. With some brief further research, I found out that this plant can be used topically as a moisturizer, in teas, as bright-yellow or green dye and to make torches with dried stems dipped in wax. These plants are often seen as weeds, and grow easily in the shade and are not very invasive. The fun part is that our tiny little fuzzy guy turns into something much wilder:

Mullein all grown up.

Because this plant is seen as a weed, it is not cultivated as much as its pretty (and arguably showy) sister species of the same genus, V. phoeniceum.

V. Phoeniceum, the popular child of the Mullein clan.

What's with that? I mean, it seems as though our love for color and beauty has made us biased towards certain plants over others. I am not saying that V. Phoeniceum is not beautiful- it's just that we love plants like this only for their face value. Our friend Verbascum Thapsus (common mullein), however, has properties that would not be known without word-of-mouth, trial-and-error, the study of history and the always helpful added spark of curiosity. Another fun fact: common mullein, according to Pliny the Elder in his “Naturalis Historia”, was thought to be linked to witches and widely held to ward off curses and evil spirits.

I am looking forward to learning more about what dye plants lie underfoot right here in Philadelphia. Marafiki Arts so far has confirmed collaborations with Crane Arts, The Longview Center for Agriculture and students at Girard College on growing dye plants and conducting workshops on natural dyes. So here's to a wonderful spring growing season and to learning something new everyday about what grows in the cracks in your sidewalk.