Meet the Plants

Most days you will find me out in the gardens having long conversations with the plants and tending to their needs (as they tend to mine).  I'd like you to meet a few of these amazing beings who bring so much color, medicine, and food into our lives.  Click through each of the slide shows to view more of our plant friends.

 

Purple Hollyhock

This edible flower is a gentle medicine for the digestion and creates a fabulous blue ecoprint!

Madder Root

The gorgeous dark red roots of Madder create a range of pinks, reds, salmon, orange, even purple!

Elder

Elder flowers and berries are both edible and medicinal. The berries also create a lovely pale pink dye.

Fennel

Fennel is absolutely wonderful for digestion and bloating, and the delicate leaves make a flowing fern-like ecoprint.

Oats

Oats, picked in their juicy, milky stage, are cooling and supportive to the nervous system. Oat seed, or the meal, is used to soothe skin irritation.

Rue

Traditionally used as a digestive bitter, the leaves also create a lovely yellow print.

Coreopsis

A powerhouse dye plant. Coreopsis comes in many colors and creates stunning ecoprints in yellows, oranges, and reds.

Peach

Leaves are used as a cooling medicine helpful for a hot digestion and to help stop over thinking when you want to sleep. The bark creates a pale pink dye.

Smoke Bush

Leaves create a fantastic grey-blue print.

Redbud

Redbud leaves create a lovely heart-shaped print with blues, greens, yellows, and greys!

Japanese Indigo

These emerald green leaves create brilliant blues! Leaves can be steamed like spinach or dried for tea!

Lavender

Ahhhh, my sweet Lavender! I feel myself calming just thinknig about it. Such a beautiful plant for the nerves! The flower and stem also makes a delicate ecoprint.

Calendula

This little flower packs quite a punch! It is wonderful as a skin healing oil, made into tincture for its digestive and lymph moving properties, and dried for tea. The flowers are also edible.

Grape

We all know of grapes for food and wine, but the tannins in the leaves create fabulous brown and grey prints.

Hibiscus

Hibiscus comes in so many colors and sizes. The flowers are an edible treat that sooth the digestion. Hibiscus sabdariffa, the medicinal variety, has a dark red calyx beneath its white flower that is full of Vitamin C and creates lovely shades of pinks and blues.

Rose

Rose is so giving with its medicine. The hips are packed with Vitamin C, the petals are wonderfully cooling and calming, and the scent! Oh my! Hips and Petals are also edible, and the petals and leaves create shadowy blue and grey prints.

Goldenrod

A delicious medicine for allergies and inflammation, you can achieve stunning yellows and greens with goldenrod

Marigold

Another tasty edible flower, Marigolds create a huge range of brilliant yellows, oranges, and greens.

Hawthorn

The leaves, flowers, and berries of thorny hawthorn work as a supportive heart and circulatory medicine.

Nettles

Yep! The stinging kind! Nettles are food, medicine, dye, & fiber!! They do it all!