I am learning to love the wind again. It comes in great gusts down the mountains, animating everything it touches into a volatile dance—the desert shrubs, the birds in flight, and the fire that broke out this week just down the road. It was hot in the valley, and I was twenty miles from home, packing groceries into the cooler in my passenger seat when I got the text. Just checking on you. I heard there’s a fire nearby.

On the Cal-Fire map, the fire’s center was marked at the intersection of the highway and the road I live on, where I’d just moved three days before. The fire had burned five acres—I refreshed the page—now ten. My house isn’t far up the road, which is named for the dominant shrub in the area. They’d already given the fire a name: the Sage Fire.

My hands and head screamed with pins and needles as the blood drained from them, rerouted to my organs as my brain and breath entered fight or flight. I flew home, speeding down the highway, my boyfriend on the phone a hundred miles away reminding me to breathe, just breathe. Owens Lake stretched out to the east and a column of gray smoke rose up in the south. The longest twenty minutes of my life were drained from me on that drive.

Vision blurred, I turned onto my road, and with shaking hands, I somehow unlocked my gate. The fire wasn’t here. Not yet. While I was driving it had grown to thirty acres, and in that time the wind had picked up and changed direction—twelve miles per hour, due north. The fire was a mile or two to the south. I watched smoke rise from behind my house as the wind whipped my hair, carrying the scent of burning sagebrush closer.

Two airplanes and a helicopter flew in loops above me, scooping water from the reservoir across the highway and heading back over the low ridge which separated me from the fire. I ran back out to the road—I couldn’t believe how fast my feet could go—and down to my nearest neighbor, a lavender farmer near the highway. The gate was open, but no one was around. I turned back and paced the road, passed through a swarm of bees who had taken up residence in the shelter of a wizened sagebrush. A pickup was approaching, and the man inside rolled down his window, revealing two big dogs barking in the backseat. Shhh, shhh, he said. I’ve been texting with the sheriff. They’ve got that thing pretty contained.

He wasn’t far behind me when I dropped to my knees in the dirt, bees buzzing all around as all the blood rushed back to my head. I thought I might be sick right there on the roadside. A few seconds passed—or a few minutes, I’m not sure—before I got to my feet and shuffled home. I watched the billowing smoke from the south-facing window in my bedroom, refreshing the Cal-Fire page until eventually, finally, it read: forward progress stopped.

On hot, windy days my skin prickles with goosebumps. Summer here is relentlessly hot and windy. High Sierran air, cooler and denser, is drawn down the eastern escarpment by the hot desert air below—low and high pressure seeking equilibrium, inducing a westerly wind which blows every afternoon until the day cools off after dark. The curtain is whipping in the window behind me, and the wind sweeps across my neck and shoulders while I write. Since losing my home in a fire last winter, I’ve learned that pleasure can intertwine with grief’s pain. Strength is kept alive inside an outer shell of fear. Resilience and survival are teachers in the art of appreciating—even enjoying—the life we’ve been given, as they remind us how easily it can all be taken away.

There’s no air conditioning in here; I live in a closer dance with the elements. My skin bristles at the wind’s touch, which is warm, but a reprieve from the heat. I’m beckoned outside to pull some weeds from below the pomegranate tree I’ve been tending. The gate behind the tree shudders, and beyond it, the leaves of two great cottonwoods flutter in the wind. There’s a hammock tied between their trunks; I untwist the cords and fabric and climb inside. The canvas is clean and sun-warmed, and sunlight and shadow dance all over me through the canopy as I’m rocked gently, moved by the wind.

Thank you for reading Tinctoria, the newsletter from me, Erin of Berbo Studio.

Keep in touch: Web 𖦹 Instagram 𖦹 Email

This past weekend, under the full flower moon, I moved into a new home on forty acres in the Eastern Sierra. The land—on the blurred edge between the Mojave and Great Basin deserts, at the foot of the great mountains—is dotted with springs, cut by ravines, and populated by cottonwoods and willows, rabbits and frogs, swaths of (currently prolifically blooming) yerba mansa, and endless, fragrant sagebrush.

Inside the house is an old fireplace built with local stone—big chunks of granite and gleaming black obsidian. There are small chips of obsidian scattered all over the property, worked into sharp points by human hands—evidence this place has long been loved and visited by people. I’m honored to be next in line to care for it.

After last winter, when whatever cosmic force in charge of earthly goings-on spat me out from the life I knew and into the wild unknown, I wandered for a while, embittered and embattled, not quite ready to meet what would come next. The fire burned away certain things I’d once known in my bones: the feeling of home, in a place and in a community.

In the aftermath, my relationship to my greatest teacher—the earth—shifted on its axis. I felt unmoored, like I was floating in space…nothing to hold on to…until I noticed there was still ground beneath me, only it was unknown to me. Unfamiliarity first felt like fear, until I started doing what I always do when I arrive somewhere new: get down low to the earth. Learn the plants, the soil, the rocks, the animals. Begin to know this new land.

Being here is a commitment to being with the land. To knowing it, tending it, and engaging with all the nuance and messiness that good relationships contain. I hope you’ll join me in this process. I intend to host all kinds of events here—workshops, retreats, gatherings, offerings from others. It’s far from town (but it’s far from lonely; life is pulsing, sometimes overwhelmingly, all around), yet it’s less than three hours from Los Angeles, where I’ll continue to travel to work and teach.

Here, I feel my connections within the web of life most acutely, and I’m grateful beyond what I’m able to describe that we are connected in this way. It is with a network of support that I’m ushered into this new phase; into further nurturing my relationship with the earth. This relationship is our right and responsibility, and what a joy that we get to engage in it together.

With love and gratitude, from the Berbo Homestead.

Thank you for reading Tinctoria, the newsletter from me, Erin of Berbo Studio.

Keep in touch: Web 𖦹 Instagram 𖦹 Email

Weeks pass, a month, and no mail arrives for me. The mailboxes in town are all lined up on one side of the street, and when the postal carrier pulls up at the cluster containing my metal box, which is modern and brown and printed neatly with my house number on the front, I greet her enthusiastically, hoping to impress upon her: I’m here! I exist! She waves back from behind the glass of her truck’s window, but I can see she doesn’t recognize me, doesn’t quite believe me, and then she drives away.

Every now and then I get a package or letter for someone else with the same house number, one street over. I walk a block to their mailbox in the evening to drop the parcel off, find their box filled with the familiar swirl of junk and catalogs and bills. It’s so homey; so cozy in there. The full mailbox feels like some functioning organ of a pulsating, vibrant life. I leave a note: I live one block over; maybe you’re getting my mail? I leave my number, but no one calls.

Never before have I wanted to be found in this way. I receive no holiday cards, no postcards, no pennysaver ads. The DMV can’t even find me, though I’ve sent form after official form indicating my change of address. Maybe I’ll never get called up for jury duty again. No credit card bills come; no proof of insurance. With no mail addressed to me, I can’t even get a library card. I’ve gone unintentionally underground, without a paper trail.

Again this morning, the mailbox is empty and dark as a cavern. A question rolls across my mind like a tumbleweed: Do I even exist? Two spiders have spun a web and are refining an orb-shaped egg sac in the back of the mailbox. I shut the door, wish them well, and float silently back across the street, to my lair.

I rented a box at the post office last year when I noticed the mail carrier was marking all packages bound for my home as undeliverable. After I lost everything in the fire, I had an aversion to acquiring new things, but I needed certain objects to work and live, so I ordered them online. A tea kettle. Camera batteries. Underwear. Packages trickled into the post office every week or so. A relief, to read my name printed on mundane mail—affirmation of my existence, when it felt especially fragile.

But then the mail inexplicably stopped arriving at the post office, too. The postal workers were not as enthralled as I was by the mystery of my sudden non-existence. I waited in line to show them evidence of a package’s convoluted movements or false delivery; from across the counter, I pointed to coded strings of numbers on my phone screen, but neither of us could decipher their meanings. I’d return to my empty, echoing home, and make some tea.

I can picture my old mailbox, rickety and with chipped black paint, unmatched to the Spanish-style home with bright white stucco exterior and teal trim which it once sat outside of. The box still stood after the house burned down, slightly crooked on its post—as always—and I imagine it stuffed with mail from people, banks, businesses, government agencies; all sorts of entities, all of them looking for me.

There, I existed. In the old town, it was nearly guaranteed I’d run into someone I knew just walking down the street, to the grocery store or post office. I wander around this new town like a ghost. No one knows I’m here. Sometimes I think they can see right through me. That’s fine—I don’t want to be seen, to explain what churns inside of me to strangers. I can’t yet describe how it feels to be unmoored with such force from the life I thought was mine, so often I prefer not to speak at all. If anyone wrote to me, I’m not sure what I’d write back, or whether I would write at all.

No mail comes, no one looks for me, and life plods along in the old town, without me. “There’s some freedom in it,” I tell strangers, “in starting all over.” I’m tired of hearing myself say it. I always wanted to put down roots, but my landlord didn’t let me plant a garden, wouldn’t let me paint the walls. I miss the texture of the plaster walls, over a hundred years old, and I can still feel their furrows, their cool surface, where I leaned against them in the darkened entryway that night. The street was black, the power long out, and the hot wind was blowing ash and embers with hurricane force outside. I can feel the backs of my arms against the wall, where I’d tucked myself into a corner to listen through the window to my neighbors outside. They were debating whether or not to evacuate. None of us knew that the fire was just a few blocks away. There were no evacuation orders; no firetrucks or officials in sight. I left and the neighbors stayed. My house burned and theirs still stands. Fate deals swift, decisive, and indifferent hands.

Today, I dropped a couple packages off at the post office, and checked my box like a sort of empty ritual. Where my key usually clicks against air, I felt it catch on something, on paper. Inside, a yellow slip with my box number and x2 written in blue ink. Two packages. I hadn’t ordered anything; I’ve taken to shopping for most everything locally, sometimes driving a dozen or so miles to the bigger town nearby for what I can’t get at the local hardware or general stores. The packages must have been someone else’s.

But the clerk returned with two big boxes from the back room, both addressed to me. They held banal but sacred artifacts. Two folding bamboo drying racks, for hanging and displaying my hand-dyed goods, ordered a year ago and long declared lost. The packages had been shipped with identical labels, with identical tracking numbers, which must have confounded the postal gods. They floated around in the delivery ether for months—miraculously never returned to sender—before making their way to me.

“Blame the UPS store,” the clerk said wryly, pointing to the labels’ origin. “I blame no one,” I said, “I’m just glad for the unexpected gift.” Glad, finally, for proof I exist.

Thank you for reading Tinctoria, the newsletter from me, Erin of Berbo Studio.

I’m happy to announce my next workshop, on Saturday, April 25th at Feser Cold Springs in Ojai, California: Color Medicine.

Keep in touch: Web ꩜ Instagram ꩜ Email

In sagebrush country, on warm days, the scent of medicine swirls in the air. Some of the same compounds which give Artemisia tridentata its signature scent and potent medicinal qualities also produce brilliant natural dye colors, and we’re after both—color and medicine—in this immersive one-day workshop: Color Medicine.

Join me at Feser Cold Springs, a rustic homestead on the confluence of Tule and Sespe Creeks housing a spring-fed flower and fruit farm—about fifteen miles north of Ojai, but in an entirely different world—for a day outdoors celebrating sagebrush’s dye and herbal medicine.

Learn More & Sign Up

We’ll dye silks with Artemisia’s vivid colors, brewed from plants we’ll harvest on-site, and create medicinal salve using sagebrush oil—infused the day of the workshop—with the option to add other plants, both medicinal and colorful, to our salves and dye pots. In conversation and practice, we’ll explore ethical harvesting practices, land-tending and relationship, and discuss sagebrush’s role in the ecosystems it defines.

You’ll leave with a dyed wearable silk capturing the color of a place and time—high spring in sagebrush country—and a tin of your own coordinating medicinal, fragrant salve. Both processes will be explored from start to finish, offering you a foundation to repeat the techniques yourself, and to forge an ongoing relationship with this plant, the places it grows, and its potent medicinal color.

I hope you’ll join me for this special one-day workshop—a day spent outdoors among fragrant sagebrush and blooming flowers, beside the creek trickling in the background as it threads its way through the mountains, with our dyes simmering in water from the farm’s spring, and the medicine of Artemisia inspiring and guiding our craft!

Color Medicine — April 25 in Ojai, CA

Keep in touch with Berbo Studio: Web ꩜ Instagram ꩜ Email

How many millions of goldfields will bloom in Carrizo Plain this season? The number seems nearly incalculable, like trying to count all of the stars. Each yellow blossom, a centimeter or so in diameter, is not a single flower but a flowerhead containing several dozen individual flowers, arrayed as discs spiraling from a center and rays fanning out from there. Multiply this by miles of fields and hills in dense golden bloom, and the number edges toward imaginary, toward infinite.

We follow animal trails through low golden thickets, across loose rocky hillsides surrounded by nothing but yellow, the countless flowers glowing like living light and moving as one with the wind. Alone, a single goldfield has undetectable fragrance, but moving through fields of them, an earthy-sweet scent stirs and swirls in the air, clings to me like their dusty golden pollen clings to my boots and pants.

Gold of Lasthenia californica, lemon of Monolopia lanceolata, saffron of Leptosyne californica—the valley’s many yellows are seared into my psyche. I see yellow when I close my eyes; when I sleep. Yellow again at dawn when I emerge from my tent, stretching across the hills bathed in a day’s new light. Yellow follows me around all day, like the flowers’ faces tracing the sun across the sky. Yellow—the earth endlessly praising the sun right back.

Heliotrope purple Phacelias and magenta owl’s clovers (Castilleja exserta) are common enough, but amid the yellow sea they seem nearly as precious as the rare California jewelflowers (Caulanthus californicus), which grow proud and tall with stalks of burgundy blooms. Some of the most abundant plants spreading their colors across this valley and the mountains surrounding it are endemic to this land; some are highly rare and endangered, though you wouldn’t know it by their numbers here.

You could mistake Munz’s tidytips (Layia munzii) for yet another common yellow bloom, but they are found only in a small portion of central California, their populations threatened and their viable homeland reduced by encroaching agriculture. Fiery orange-and-red San Joaquin blazingstars (Mentzelia pectinata) emerge in burn scars—and few other places—in great numbers, and Delphinium recurvatum, with their claw-shaped lavender flowers, grow just off-trail, just outside the parking lot, seeming commonplace despite being not at all common.

The rare plants have an air of defiance, amplified by their abundance. This is their land. They learned how to live here, to wait out drought years or to opportunistically sprout after fire—adaptations honed over countless generations. In only a handful of human generations, we’ve come to threaten them with how we choose to use the land. My land, some folks think, but really, it’s all of ours. As much the common goldfield’s and the rare jewelflower’s, both of whom have learned to flourish here. Among countless invasive grasses, grazing cows, cars, and tourists, against all odds, they claim what is theirs for another season.

Crouching down to the Linanthus’ level, its nocturnal flowers withdrawn into a tight spiral of white petals, I understand the urge to seek shelter from the harshness of this world. The creamcups (Platystemon californicus) furl up in the afternoon, too, their many anthers enclosed in tiny pods of cream and gold, having allowed the fairy moths and flies their fill of nectar, just for the morning. Their openness is brief and tenuous; the flowers also close to the cold, to the rain. How long have they perfected this form of self-protection, so they may grow in such abundance, covering open grasslands—what few are left—from Baja California to Oregon?

May we all be lucky enough to grow (and adapt, and evolve) as we’re meant to. The right conditions are hard to come by, in these times tainted by a changing climate, and with our modern lives colored by so much disconnection. Maybe the tourists who flock here with their cameras are drawn to a place in full flower because they are hungry to witness a world exactly as it is meant to be. Alive with potential and nourishment—a giant garden of edible bulbs and seeds and greens and flowers—and full of flourishing life. Their photographs are evidence: this is possible, for all of us.

Kneeling in waist-high grass at the edge of a field of Great Valley Phacelia (Phacelia ciliata)—scented somehow just like its vibrant, heady purple—I find myself drawn lower and lower, finally laying down on the soft green earth, submitting to the wisdom of flowers in their fullest state of being. My companions—two professional botanists, a fellow plant lover, and a toddler—all know the flourishing feeling, and we follow it relentlessly. We rest in our beds of grass at the purple sea’s edge, merging for a time with the land, utterly alive, and sensing all the possibility of a world fully in flower.

Thank you for reading Tinctoria, the newsletter from me, Erin of Berbo Studio.

I’m happy to announce my next workshop, on Saturday, May 23rd at California Botanic Garden: Natural Dyes of the San Gabriel Foothills.

Keep in touch: Web ꩜ Instagram ꩜ Email

New in the Berbo Studio Shop

Infused with plant medicine and scents from the mountains and the lowlands, captured in nourishing salves to soothe your skin and spirit. High Country Salve is heady with the scent of piñon resin and needles and great basin sagebrush. Low Country Salve is imbued with mugwort, black and purple sage, and yerba santa.

Shop Salves

Harvested by hand and with great care, these plants were immersed in soothing avocado oil for one month (from new moon to new moon), capturing their generous scent and potent medicine to share with you in hand-poured 1 oz. tins.

Both salves contain just three ingredients: plant-infused avocado oil, local Ojai beeswax, and organic shea butter.

Ingredient Notes

Piñon resin has been used for millennia to heal wounds, cuts, and burns. It has potent anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial properties, and acts as a protective barrier, sealing moisture into parched skin.

Sagebrush has antiseptic properties and has been used historically to cleanse and soothe rashes, wounds, and insect bites.

Mugwort is noted for reducing inflammation—in addition to its antimicrobial and antioxidant properties—and has been used to treat poison oak rash and other skin irritations. Its anti-inflammatory action may also soothe pain from bruising or sore muscles.

Black Sage contains monoterpenoids and diterpenoids which penetrate skin to treat inflammation and pain. Purple Sage has analgesic, antiseptic, anti-inflammatory, and antimicrobial properties known to alleviate pain and skin irritation.

Yerba Santa has anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and antimicrobial properties which soothe inflamed skin and support skin regeneration.

…And all lend their delicious, potent scents to these naturally healing salves.

Read More & Shop Salves

Thank you for reading Tinctoria, the newsletter from me, Erin of Berbo Studio.

I’m happy to announce my next workshop, on Saturday, May 23rd at California Botanic Garden: Natural Dyes of the San Gabriel Foothills.

Keep in touch: Web ꩜ Instagram ꩜ Email

Some roads remain the same, but others change each time I drive them. The roads leading into and through Anza-Borrego are named with a series of similar letters and numbers—State Routes 78 and 79, S-2 and S-22—and although the Coloradan Desert landscapes they connect vary widely, I can’t seem to distinguish one from the other. Is S-2 the old overland stagecoach route originating on the continent’s other coast, or is that S-22? No, S-22 is the asphalt line cutting across the edges of alluvial fans shed by the Santa Rosa Mountains, where wildflowers show up during the winters following good rains. This year, according to the sign outside the visitor center, nearly seven inches have fallen by late February. Last year at this time, just one inch. This place changes like I do—inconsistently—because it is alive. The roads are not, yet they morph in my mind like the land in response to rain.

On these roads I’ve been heartbroken, elated, alone and in love with the world. In the quiet of nothing but a humming engine and the gusting wind through my windows, I’ve caught glimpses of myself from new angles, missed the dirt turnoff, gotten lost then found my way again amid old mine ruins and flowering ocotillo and desert lilies. I’ve stared into the badlands and they’ve stared back, both of us misunderstood, labeled as defiant or deficient—bad—simply for being what we are. “My Life Is in Ruins,” reads a bumper sticker on a dusty truck outside the Desert Pantry, “Discover Borregan Archaeology.” In groves of mesquite I’ve run my fingers over mortar stones, smooth as the spring-fed stream’s song tinkling alongside them. I’ve unearthed and turned over rocks and parts of myself, no clue what I’m looking at, but finding each piece beautiful, perfect in the true sense of the word.1 Parts which fit together, forming something which will never be finished, like history.

Sundogs glow from clouds flanking the sun, and with nowhere I need to be, I’ve followed them like beacons, both of our paths shaped by the rising wind—mine, off-trail, and the once-glowing clouds’ into thin air, into nothing; at least nothing I can see. The desert distorts your sense of scale, of perspective. It toys with time, stretches it across playas which must end somewhere, just nowhere I’ll ever reach. The slot canyon is completely—perfectly—dry, but it holds the memory of the water which shaped it. In a sliver of shade, hallucinating from heat, I think I can smell and hear it—running water. Memory, our sense for invisible history. I’ve stopped looking for proof everywhere, but some places it can still be found.

This place and I change at different paces, and when we meet, we are often unrecognizable. Familiar echoes ring through the valley, but fade as the ancient creosote shrubs get buried in blowing sand. Heat mirages reflect the sky like thin lakes, evaporating when I get close. The barren salt plains glow white like the desert primroses at dawn. The primroses’ petals seem delicate, but they flap like unfrayed canvas sails in the wind. Tiny bees cling to their anthers; to life. I cling tightly to the sources of sustenance which link me to this cherished existence, on this planet populated by immense pain and treasure in equal measure.

At times I feel I could float above this valley, soar with the ravens and fleeting sundogs. One day, I will. I hope I’ll be remembered like the sundogs live—here only briefly, but glowing in all the colors light can muster. Maybe while I’m here we’ll catch sight of each other across the sky, and for a moment wordlessly remember what bonds us, in this instant and forever. And then the light changes.

Thank you for reading Tinctoria, the monthly(ish) newsletter from me, Erin of Berbo Studio.

I’m happy to announce my next workshop, on Saturday, May 23rd at California Botanic Garden: Natural Dyes of the San Gabriel Foothills.

Keep in touch: Web ꩜ Instagram ꩜ Email

Rain starts a new season in Southern California, and in the warm days which follow, verdant growth unfurls all around—offering us so many sources of vibrant natural color.

Join me along the Ventura River on the first Sunday of spring for What Gifts the Rain Brings, a workshop exploring the natural dyes available to us on this seasonal cusp, between the rainy season and the botanical bounty which it brings.

Learn More & Sign Up

In the morning, we’ll brew our dyes—from locally harvested mushrooms, flowers, herbs, minerals, and more—and learn to mordant (prepare) textiles for the dye colors which will be ready by the afternoon. Midday, we’ll pause to enjoy a seasonal vegetarian lunch prepared by culinary artist Chef Kylie, who makes food infused with local flavor and love for the earth.

You’ll create up to two completed dye projects—with silk and cotton options provided—and will leave with a handout with recipes and techniques learned in class, and knowledge and inspiration to continue working with this season’s natural dyes on your own.

I hope you’ll join me for this special one-day workshop at beautiful Birdsong Ranch, right on the Ventura River outside of Ojai, California.

What Gifts the Rain Brings

Keep in touch with Berbo Studio: Web ꩜ Instagram ꩜ Email

Paid subscribers to this newsletter are supporting this work—thank you so much—and will continue to receive content made just for them. The essay below is public, so please feel free to share it with anyone who might enjoy it.

Next month, I’ll be announcing my schedule of spring workshops in Southern California! Stay tuned here to learn more about these offerings, and to sign up (they usually fill up quickly).

Keep in touch: Web ꩜ Instagram ꩜ Email

Subscribe now

On Belonging

When I got to the gate separating the half mile of dirt road ahead from the twenty miles of dirt road I’d just driven in on, it was locked. I knew it would be. It’s the off-season, just one ranger on duty in the whole valley, and I’d hoped to find him here, but there was a note on the window of the darkened visitor center: Out on patrol.

From the parking lot, a tiny dirt square carved out of the valley, now in its endless green post-rain regalia, I could see the great sandstone formation looming in the grassy sea, and the dwarfed metal gate enclosing it. The grass around the rock rippled and shimmered as the wind combed through it, teasing out a thousand different shades of green. The rock stood, unmoved. It had seen countless days as glorious as this one. It would see countless more.

Back on the road, a white pickup was kicking up dust in the distance. In a minute we reached each other, slowed and rolled our windows down, as you do when meeting another soul crossing the same lonely road. It was the ranger. His eyes smiled and seemed surprised to see me. I’d encountered only one other person in the valley that day; a rancher in a truck who’d tipped his hat as we passed each other at a muddy crossing free of fresh tire tracks.

The ranger and I leaned out our windows toward each other. “Is the rock closed for the season?” I asked.

“No—I’m headed that way. Got a pen for the gate code?” He called out the numbers over his shoulder, then rolled up his window to shield from the dust.

I followed in his wake back toward the gate. He stopped near the visitor center to locate a shovel and traction boards from a shed; a vehicle was stuck in the mud on the other side of the valley. Getting back in his truck, the ranger listed off the rules for visiting the site: Stay on the road and trails. Don’t climb on the rock. Personal photos only; no posting on social media. With that, he headed back into the vast flats of the valley, and I continued up the road toward its rim, repeating the gate code in my mind like a mantra.

My heart pounded lightly in my ears as I clicked the hefty padlock open and swung the creaking gate against the wind. I was excited and a little nervous. Did I belong here? I’d just been given official permission to enter the area, so yes, I was allowed to be here. But did I belong here?

I’ve been asking myself a similar question for the last year, since relocating to a small town not far from the vast valley. The town is in its own valley, perched upland from the ocean in a nest of mountains, in its own little world. Still, you can reach a small city nearby in a thirty minute drive, and big cities in each direction in one or two hours. In that time you could also drive to the last town I lived in, which burned in the Eaton Fire last January.

I arrived in this new town like an animal seeking shelter and safety. My home was gone, so I migrated elsewhere looking for a new one.1 The new town—I wouldn’t call it home—is inarguably lovely. Neighborhood blocks fade in and out of orchards and oak groves and horse pasture. People say hello, as we walk by, good morning, and most of them are.

From the front door of my one-room house I can walk to the river, cross it and head into canyons and up mountain ridges, connect with other trails which connect to yet more trails, and access countless miles of essentially walkable wilderness. I’ve spent the last year walking the trails outside of town, learning to belong to a new place, finding its rhythms, and attempting to sync my own with them.

The land outside of town—hilly country cut with gorges, forming swimming holes and hot springs; conifer-covered bluffs over rivers watering meadows which fill with wildflowers in spring; ephemeral salt-rimmed lakes, full of rain, reflecting the sky like diamonds—is home. I don’t feel at home in the town. Do I belong? Does it belong to me—or any of us? Tourists come through every weekend. I go up to the mountains, past the popular hiking trails. Sometimes I keep driving, right into the next valley.

I lock the gate behind me, close my car door to the wind, and head up the short rugged road, which ends at the trailhead, which leads to the rock. The road arcs above the valley but stays snugly below the low bluffs which border it, traversing a delicate edgeland: the line between shelter and exposure.

Last time I was here, the valley was in full flower. Upland and lowland were covered in swaths of yellow and purple and cream—goldfields, owl’s clover, creamcups, lupine. We camped in the hills with a view down-canyon, gazing into the bloom, which carried on into the valley and over the next mountain range, glowing pink and orange as the sun set. There is a deep solace, an assuring feeling, in a densely flowering place. Back home, I read about our biological response to flowers, which signal to us: Food. Many flowers mean many seeds, many of them edible and nutritive. Abundant plant life indicates to us: My needs could be met here. We can sense where we belong.

I park and start down the trail. The winter sun is in its afternoon repose, casting a low gold light over the plain below. From here I can see a fine earthen thread running across the flat expanse of the valley, and a single gleaming thing moving along it—the ranger’s truck on the road. The stone comes into view, huge and smooth, a lonely sand-colored shape molded by a bygone river and millions of years of exposure. Its posture near the valley rim gives it the air of a sentry looking down upon a kingdom.

The wind and I are on the same path, both headed toward the rock like we’ve caught the same swell; gravity pulling us in one direction. The wind moves faster, so I pick up my pace. The rock’s weather-smoothed surface soon fills my vision, stretching ten times taller than me, sloping slightly down and to the left. I follow where it curves and opens into a U-shape, cavernous within and flanked by tall, rounded walls. The whole stone horseshoe is darkened inside, where the low sun can’t reach, and my vision takes a moment to adjust, to register anything but the glaring blue of the cloudless winter sky, which is reduced to a slim strip above me.

Up and down the sandstone walls are caverns—many caves carved by the wind. I can see into the caves closest to the ground, and on their floors are depressions, perfectly round and evenly spaced. Mortar holes. They must have mixed the pigments here.

First, I see the painted shapes on the cavern walls. A spiraling wheel with spokes. Repeating diamonds. Then, farther back in the cul-de-sac, the human and animal figures emerge. One appears to pounce, or dance, and I move, too, deeper into the open heart of the rock.

A large layered panel painted in stark black and white and striking red halts my steps. It’s mural-sized, painted high up. I look for hollows in the rock the painter may have wedged into, braced or leaned against to complete each section. The style is unique from other local rock paintings I’ve seen. The design is intricate and layered, and the pigment coverage on the rock is near total, at least where pigment remains. Large portions of the painting have deteriorated, or have been destroyed.

Some of the paintings here are thousands of years old, and many of them remained intact until a hundred or so years ago. Since then, modern people have shot bullet holes into the panels, carved and drawn dates and initials on top of the ancient paintings. What remain are fragments. Enough, though, to convey what once was.

Before the gate, before the Bureau of Land Management, before the ranchers, before the Spaniards, native peoples moved in and out of this valley, some inhabiting it for hundreds or a thousand years or more, before migrating elsewhere. Other people moved in; then others. All of their art, in distinct styles, from different eras and cultures, mingles together on the rock. They painted in the same place—in the shelter of the big alcove, and in the smaller interior alcoves within. They all sensed sacredness here, hundreds or thousands of years apart.

Without question, the people who painted these images belonged to this place. They gathered pigments discerningly from near and far, and brought them here, to paint on the earth where it rose up to meet them. They lived as one with this place, at the whims of its phenomena. On the rock there is a symbol for rain, painted in red; another for sun. Our modern lives are shaped by these same forces, but we’ve built much more between us. Here, I feel closer to them. I’m reminded I belong to them.

To belong is to be responsible. To answer to. I belong to the valley, to the beings who live here. I belong to the mountains which surround the valley, and to the next valley over, and the fire which burned there, and the beings who died and the new ones who live there now. I belong to the canyons and the rivers, flooded and dry, leading into the next valley, and I belong to the land beyond that. I belong to the land.

Each morning and evening, the garden plot was watered on an automatic timer. At night, I slept under densely starry skies and was visited by dreams—the indigo bed beckoned me silently back. While I was gone, the timer’s batteries had died, and the indigo’s plush green leaves were withering, their dried edges curling and turning brown and dusty blue under the unrelenting sun.1

High season gardening requires steadier attention than I can summon when there are rivers to swim in and sand dunes to climb. In fall, the garden moves more slowly, and I find our paces aligning. I scatter seeds, hand-water and hope for rain—it comes after the nearly cloudless heat of early fall in southern California, when plants in the wild also await the change of season.

Summer ripens seeds; wind and birds and time disperse them. Fall’s first good rain starts the cycle of a new season for native Californian plants. We can synchronize with this cycle, sow seeds in anticipation of the coming rains, and witness a garden grow on its own native time.

Sowing A Native Dye Garden

This season I’m experimenting. In one of my garden plots I’ve sown an assortment of all native seeds, of plants I suspect to be potent with natural color.

I’ve been compiling a list for years—of resinous, strong-smelling plants; of drought-adapted, chemically active and medicinal plants. Of the many Asteraceae (sunflower family) plants with saturated yellow blooms; those which I would not remove from their wild habitats, but which light up some dyer’s intuition in me akin to their radiant blooms, attracting pollinators. Treasured texts from botanist and naturalist friends: This plant stained my hands! They all get added to the list, and if I can source and nurture their seeds to germination, I’ll try their dye content and share my findings with you.

This Almanac is my first log of progress—and recommendations—for growing a dye garden with all native Californian flora.

Native Dye Plot Highlights: yellow-flowering Asteraceae: brittlebush, goldfields, tickseeds • plants with promising chemical profiles: desert bluebells, vinegarweed, woolly blue curls • container-loving dye plants: alumroot, coffeeberry, toyon

Read more

This seasonal Almanac is the first of its kind—a guide to fall natural dye harvests in California. The full entry (and all past Almanac entries) is available to paid subscribers of this newsletter. Thank you for reading!

Subscribe now

Autumn Dyes in California

Aspen leaves (Populus tremuloides) • Black walnuts (Juglans species) • Coffeeberry (Frangula californica) • Creosote galls (Larrea tridentata; Asphondylia auripila) • Curly dock (Rumex crispus) • Goldenrod (Solidago species) • Oak galls and acorns (Quercus species) • Redwood cones (Sequoia sempervirens) • Rabbitbrush (Chrysothamnus, Ericameria species) • Sagebrush, Wild tarragon (Artemisia species) • Telegraphweed (Heterotheca grandiflora)

Read more

I wake up and go straight to the lake. Follow the sandy roads on foot a short way to the steep, sandy stairs, climb down the little ladder and onto the strip of beach—a compact cove hemmed in by deep green woods, sketched with high tide lines and animal tracks, and marked by the single dark vein of a creek running through the damp sand and into the vast lake.

The lake water is pure turquoise, stretching to the horizon, but edged in a deep gray which merges with the curtain of rain falling on it in the distance. In the sand, glowing in the last streak of gold light before a thunderstorm, are rocks of every shade of gray and green, run velvet-smooth by churning waves from storms stirred up by the lake itself.

The stones gather in great numbers where the dancing river meets the stoic lake, where the stream deposits water and sediment like offerings at the end of its journey. It’s the texture of one stone near the stream’s mouth, rougher than the others, which catches my eye; with tiny white bits like bones jutting out from its moonlike surface.

Up close, the gray orb is embedded with circular and starlike shards, tiny rectangles and rhombi in relief. I roll it around in my palm, rinse it off in the running river water—maybe the shapes are somehow made of sand. But they don’t move from the stone; only seem to glow whiter as the sky darkens with incoming clouds.

Up the grass-embroidered dune, through the dark shade of the white oaks, back to the front porch to wait out the storm. Sand left by receding glaciers which carved the lake basin, brought ashore by eons of onshore winds; sand which built the dunes along the lakeshore—forested dunes, fossil dunes, two-hundred foot dunes actively forming and eroding—still clings to my feet. I wash it off in the yard before going inside.

The pale shapes in the gray rock are fossilized shards of ancient sea lilies. Crinoids which lived four hundred million years ago in the warm, shallow inland sea preceding today’s Lake Michigan. When melting glaciers carved out the basin thousands of years ago, they reached sediment buried deep down. Hundreds of millions of years encoded in old seabed. Bits and pieces of it wash up on the lakeshore at high tide each day.

Time tumbles the stone, reveals the past. Polished in places, rougher in others; the texture of one world ending so the next may be born. All the sea lilies in the Silurian sea died1—as did around eighty-five percent of marine species in the Silurian era. What comes next is always unimaginable, until it inevitably arrives. I wake up and go straight to the lake, to meet it.

Read Part I:

Paid subscribers receive full access to this month’s Almanac and all past entries. I appreciate your support of this project, and I hope you enjoy!

Subscribe now

The Dyer's Almanac: Coffeeberry & Buckthorn

The way the wind blows through the canyon, you’d think it carved the way itself. Seeking the land’s lowest points like a river, singing its breathy song down the dry gorge for ages, it must have shaped it. If you stand on the high banks of the wind river, on the edges of the canyon, the steady breeze plays gently at the ends of your hair, the hem of your shirt. Stand in the full stream, risk being whisked in a gust downriver.

Where the land warps in toward the canyon’s mouth, the road follows, skirting some deep geologic memory. I pull over in the dirt at the curve. Up canyon, a dry waterfall. Down canyon, a steep cliff above the valley where the real river runs, counter to the wind, creating its own world down there, where the many leaves of the cottonwoods are calm. Up here, a wizened shrub—ancient, many-limbed, defiant—stands midstream in the wind’s channel, its leaves vibrating like a thousand bees.

Highwaythorn

It’s an old coffeeberry shrub—a tree, really—whose limbs I’ve stopped to prune. They are leggy and thick, strong as whips in the wind, and they are blocking a few feet of the road, so I know it’s only a matter of time before they meet the Forest Service chainsaw. I stand at the edge of the wind river and wait for a moment of calm. Check the road for cars, though I haven’t seen anyone for hours. The wind settles for a second. I’m next to the shrub, then inside it, enfolded. The wind whistles urgently through its branches, and I prune.

I collect an armful of cut stems—deep burgundy with smooth, dark leaves; ovate and curled back along the edges—and set the bundle in the backseat while I go on foot to follow a pair of brilliant yellow dogface butterflies down into the valley, toward the water. When I return hours later, the car is full of a familiar smell; acrid and earthy. Plant phenols breaking down—oxidizing, exhaling into the container of hot car air.

Coffeeberry, Frangula californica, has a chemical mix entirely its own, though similar to its fellow western North American kin Frangula purshiana, the plant whose bark has made its way around the world as the medicine known as cascara sagrada—sacred bark.1 The active compound in cascara sagrada is emodin, which is also the source of the plants’ potent natural color. Emodin is an anthraquinone compound2 with a rich, true golden-yellow hue.

Like California’s coffeeberry and cascara buckthorns, true buckthorns (Rhamnus species) are rich in emodin. Common buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica)—so common it’s earned the name highwaythorn, or waythorn, for its tendency to grow along roadsides—is native from Europe to northwest Africa and West Asia, and has been introduced elsewhere, including across North America.

In its native range, the plant has a well-documented history of use as a powerful purgative,3 and has been cultivated since before Roman times for its natural color, used variously as a textile dye, pigment, map and paper stain, early house paint, and more.

Read more

The spring is ten miles down a dirt road, which is fifty miles up the forest road. Over half a dozen dry washes, past canyons with creeks and cottonwoods spilling out of them, through corridors of manzanitas with the berries picked clean. Past where the grass is flat, where the bears sleep. Beyond the confluence of two streams, where suddenly the burgundy berries are everywhere, only they’re in big piles of fresh scat on the ground. Arctostaphylos—“bear grapes” in Greek. I clap and sing loudly as I walk toward the spring.

To get there we must pass through the burn scar. A world of monochrome gray and black, like when the sun slips behind a cloud and the shade momentarily mutes the brilliance of everything. Only there are no clouds; the sky is clear and blue, and the ground is charred and black. The ancient pinyons are dead, their limbs frozen in expression like figures at Pompeii. All leafless, some still holding onto old cones.

I scan the ground for pinyon seedlings; see none. The oaks might take over here. Above ground all their great charred trunks look dead, but there are stirrings in the underworld. A few fountains of green spring from the ashen earth in the distance. Wands tipped with spiny leaves emerge around some of the blackened trunks—oaks performing their resurrection magic.

The charred cones littering the ground may have been made by pinyons more than a hundred years old. They start producing cones around age forty, but good seed crops begin in earnest around a century in. They grow in no hurry; maybe a foot per decade. Many of these trees were easily a few hundred years old. When fire came through this canyon, it smoldered for eight days before crews contained it on the last day of July, 2024. Fifteen hundred acres of ancient gnarled pine forest burned. The cause of the fire remains unknown.

I move slowly through the hollow forest. Every step disintegrates more of the pines’ stored time, sending it back to the soil. The air, the dirt; everything smells of burned wood and roasted pinyon nuts. Like when we heated them over a fire in the cast iron—fat crackling lightly in the pan, hot and melting fast on my tongue. Seeds a hundred years in the making. While we ate, the first spark of fire was just catching in the mountains.

But back to the spring. We’re heading the right way—I can see the bright green up there. The water seeps from a crevice in the hill covered in vining clematis. Where it pours forth, ferns and flowers gather like sycophants, bowing and nodding yes, yes, yes.

The water makes everything around it grow wild and age strangely. Ask the elderberry which fruits and flowers all year. Ask the mugwort, simultaneously seeding and sprouting. Here time swirls like an eddy in a stream, age retracing its steps to youth and back around, and around, and around. Water stretches out the arc of the spiral, makes leaves spontaneously sprout from it. The evergreen willow, its shoots ranging from days to eons old, nods in accord.

At its source the spring flows like an open faucet. I fill up all my vessels, then grasp out of habit for an invisible handle, eager to close the valve and stem the precious stream. There’s no valve, of course; just the crack in the earth found by the water which knows only one function: flow.

And it does. Water dampens the whole hill, sends little rivulets like fingers down and around its sides. Outside the green oasis the land is endless sandstone, miles and miles of fine dust blowing down with every dry wind. The spring sings between the split rock it flows through. The hill is covered in a hundred shades of green. I wonder what it was like here when the fire came.

Some creatures must have sought refuge by the streams, beneath arching vines protecting cool, wet soil while fire feasted around them throughout the canyon. Plants, animals, roads, homes—the fire ate indiscriminately. But where water had fed the earth, drawn up life with deep roots and slow transpiration, the fire was less hungry. The sea of burning red lapped at its edges, but the oasis remained unwaveringly green.

Where the dirt road ends, where the sandstone hills ripple into mountains, into wilderness, there’s an arc of gnarled green pinyons gathered along a spring-fed stream. Their kin are crowded behind them to the east, where the sun is rising and where the fire hasn’t touched, not yet—not for a hundred years or more.

I’m so excited to announce my first workshop in Ojai—and right in my home neighborhood, at Meiners Oaks Community Garden.

Join me for A Garden of Color, a workshop creating botanical prints with dye plants from my plot at the garden, on Sunday, August 10th.

Together we’ll harvest color-potent flowers by hand, discuss the cultivation and chemistry of color, and you’ll make your own artful, wearable textile print.

Learn more and sign up for the workshop here.

A Garden of Color

All spring and summer I’ve been nourishing seeds into sprouts and flowers, growing plants cultivated especially for their vibrant natural dyes, and the time has come to share the harvest with you.

Join me for a workshop creating botanical prints (also known as eco-printing, or bundle dyeing) with plants from my garden plot, which we’ll harvest by hand together to make artful, symmetrical prints on cotton squares which can be worn as bandanas or displayed as art.

We’ll have a full spectrum of natural color at our fingertips—red from coreopsis, orange from cosmos, yellow and green from pericón, blue-purple from hollyhocks… and more.

Gardens are ideal places for experimenting—in our time together we’ll explore plant and dye science, dye gardening practices, and of course, the “printing” method you’ll use to create your unique work of botanical art.

Yet this time outdoors, and this process in particular, invites a playful, meditative kind of creativity, where we can think a little bit less, and let the connective, inspiring nature of working with plants take over.

Learn more and sign up here.

I hope to see you in the garden!

Keep in touch: Web ꩜ Instagram ꩜ Email

Paid subscribers receive full access to this month’s Almanac—focusing on dyes in the Rose family of plants—and all past entries. I appreciate your support of this project and I hope you enjoy!

Subscribe now

It was always an austere land, generous but not lush, not soft, not gentle. It always had two seasons: one wet, one dry. The rains and the heat can be fierce, frightening. Growing things go through their sweet slow steady order of flowering, ripening, resting as they do anywhere, but the turn from one season to the other is less transition than reversal. A few dark-grey, pouring days when the burnt and sodden brown hills brighten suddenly into the aching, piercing green of new grass… A few cloud-flurried, shining days when the orange poppies, the blue lupine, the vetch, clover, wild lilac, brodiaea, blue-eyed grass, daisies, lilies are all in bloom, whole hillsides white and purple and blue and gold, but at the same moment the grass is drying, turning pale, and the wild oats have already sown their seed. Those are the times of change: the greening into winter, the dying into summer.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home

July in California. We are in the times of change. The former ranchland between my home and the Ventura River is full of whispering dried wild oat stalks, and over the river, along one of its shaded tributary creeks, the poison oak climbing the true oaks’ trunks is already donning its near-dormancy crimson-colored leaves.

Every day the water in the swimming holes creeps lower, leaving old tidelines on the rocks and revealing an edgeland of algal mats and shallow spring-fed pools of oddly colored liquid—light turquoise, milky lavender, black—clustered like globs of mineralic paint on an artist’s palette.

Afternoons are hot and cloudless, and people crowd the edges of the pools still deep enough to swim in. Overnight—“less transition than reversal”—a dense gray mass of fog descends and blots out the mountains, casting a spell of stillness and silence. The mist meagerly waters the garden, teases leaf tips with dew, until morning comes and dissolves it into blue day.

But I imagine a moment before dawn, when the low cloud briefly meets the river’s surface; dry fog greeting dormant stream. Even water seeks itself in the dry season.

The Dyer’s Almanac: Rose

Wild roses—Rosa californica—line the banks of the shaded creek, the thorned bramble like living barbed wire guarding passage to the water. The scent of stagnant stream water mixes with delicate rose bloom, and open faces of flowers emerge from the thicket’s deep green—pink cups angled just so to hold the sunlight streaming in from a break in the deep shade.

Nearby, the blackberries create briar homes of their own, braiding thorny canes into cages to protect their not-yet-ripe fruit from hands and paws (Rubus ursinus, “blackberry of the bear”). Winged ones—beetles, bees, butterflies, others—may still come and go, pollinating the white flowers, five-petaled and many-stamened like their fellow Rose family kin.

The Rose family of plants—Rosaceae—contains thousands of species, including those in the genus Rosa, the wild and cultivated woody perennials which produce some of the world’s most ubiquitous flowers.

Also in the family are many famous fruits: the stone fruits—peaches, apricots, cherries, plums, nectarines; pomes such as apples, pears, and loquats; and aggregate fruits like blackberries, raspberries, and strawberries. Almonds are seeds from fruits of a Rosaceae tree (Prunus dulcis), and California natives hollyleaf cherry (Prunus ilicifolia) and toyon (Heteromeles arbutifolia) are in the family, too.

The inner woods of some Rose family trees—known as fruitwoods—are desirable in woodworking for their warm, rosy hues. This coloring is due in part to the presence of polyphenolic compounds in the wood, including condensed tannins, which darken to warm, golden- to rosy-brown tones as they age and oxidize.

Tannins are secondary metabolites1 produced by plants to protect them from herbivory, pathogens, and other environmental stressors. Plants generally prioritize protecting their more vulnerable outer tissue, so concentrations of these compounds are often highest in bark, stems, and leaves—which are also typically the most dye-potent parts of plants.

Rose family plants like raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries have tannins and various organic compounds useful for natural dyeing in their leaves, stems, and roots. The fruitwoods (cherry, apple, pear, peach, plum) contain tannins and other polyphenols (like yellow-tinted flavonoids) in their bark, branches, and stems.

By the end of summer, the rose thickets by the creek will be in full fruit, with rosehips tinged red-orange from flavonoid and carotenoid compounds. The ripe fruits are medicinal2 and are essential food for wildlife. They may also be used to brew a natural dye—although not by the usual method, as their primary colorants are not soluble in water.

Like the precious fruits protected by thorny brambles, rosehips’ dye color is not so easily accessed. We must find a different route—a creative way around the thicket’s natural border, to the stream where natural color flows.

Rosehip Dye Extract

Brightly colored rosehips are rich in carotenoids, a class of pigment with yellow-orange-red hues. These compounds are not water soluble, so working with them as dye is slightly more complex than simmering the plant material in water.

Carotenoids are fat soluble, so their color may be extracted in oil and used as a natural dye for food or body products. They may also be extracted in alcohol and used as a textile dye, as in the recipe below. The results are hues of warm rosy-tan on animal fibers—silk or wool—which are the most suited to this process.

Read more

On this first day of summer, I’m so happy to announce that registration is open for the next Retreat!

We’ll spend two nights—September 19 to 21—camping by the Santa Ynez River in Santa Barbara, gathered in creative and collective celebration of the Autumn Equinox.

Enjoy guided hiking, swimming, and ecologically immersive workshops, including (of course) seasonal natural dyeing.

Attendees who carpool together (and sign up together) automatically receive $50 off their seats. Learn more below, and reply to this email or leave a comment with any questions.

Autumn Equinox Retreat

Retreat Highlights

• Two nights of camping on the Santa Ynez River near Santa Barbara

• Seasonal food & drink included

• Creating with nature: natural dyeing & herbal tea workshops

• Hiking & swimming

Open to first-timers and seasoned campers alike—no camping experience is necessary to attend, but you’ll need some basic supplies.

Learn more and sign up here.

Activities

Herbal Tea Welcome Workshop

We’ll meet each other and get acquainted with the plants growing around our campground—some of which happen to be edible and medicinal. You’ll create your own signature tea blend to take home, and we’ll brew a communal pot of tea to share before settling in for our first dinner around the campfire, then stargazing under the new moon.

Hiking & Swimming

After breakfast, we’ll caravan to our hiking destination—an oak-filled canyon by the Santa Ynez River brimming with a spectrum of plant life on the cusp of seasonal change. We’ll spend time interpreting the land’s expressions, sharing stories and exploring natural history, ecology, ethnobotany, and other forces and relationships which shape the natural world around us. Cool oak oases and fragrant hillsides of drying sage may tempt us to linger… but we’ll leave the canyon and travel together to a deep pool along the Santa Ynez River, where we’ll swim and cool off before an afternoon of natural dyeing under blue oaks at camp.

Natural Dye Workshop: Seasonal Color

With dyestuff collected throughout the summer—both from the wild and from the garden—we’ll create brews of natural dye expressing the colors of the peak growing season. Together we’ll craft blends of plants to achieve specific hues: Golden yellow from a blend of marigold, sagebrush, pericón… Warm terracotta from eucalyptus bark, dyer’s coreopsis, sulphur cosmos. Combined with mineral iron—which can be cleverly and carefully harvested from the wild—a palette of autumnal olive green and deep caramel emerges. We’ll utilize these dyes, brewed with river water, to layer a spectrum of color onto US-grown organic cotton socks and other goods.

Food & Drink

All meals—seasonal, plant-based, garden-to-table—are included on the retreat, made by Hannah of Golden Heron.

Sample Menu

• Welcome Snack: herbal iced tea and roasted banana hazelnut snacking cake

• Friday Dinner: French provincial brothy beans with fresh bread and garden salad

• Saturday Breakfast: coconut tahini chia pudding with homemade preserves and fruit, earl gray tea & coffee

• Lunch: fresh veggies with hummus and beet dip, olives, garden tomato salad, and seeded crackers, protein bites, and herbal lemonade

• Dinner: vegan piperade, fresh bread and garden salad

• Sunday Breakfast: oatmeal with nut butter, homemade preserves and fruit, earl gray tea & coffee

Registration for the Retreat opens June 20th and closes July 20th.

Learn more and sign up here.

Happy Solstice! Enjoy your summer, and I hope to see you at this end of season celebration!

Let’s keep in touch: Web ꩜ Instagram ꩜ Email

Subscribe now

The full June almanac is available to paid subscribers of this newsletter. I appreciate your support, and I hope you enjoy!

Subscribe now

This month I’m honored to have written the tutorial featured in The Dogwood Dyer’s A Year in Natural Dyes. It’s all about dyeing with your local plants, specifically non-native and invasive plants (which, for a number of reasons, I’m opting to call introduced plants instead—more on that in the future).

A Year in Natural Dyes has a worldwide audience, so for my contribution I scoured lists of introduced plants found all over the world, looking for genera I recognized as dye potent, for documented ethnobotanical use, for species called tinctoria or tinctorum, for yellow-flowering members of the Asteraceae family.

With a blend of evidence and dyer’s intuition1 I made lists of plants I knew or keenly suspected to be color potent. This was similar to how I began working with local plants as dyes some years ago—with a natural curiosity, and just enough knowledge to hunger for more.

You don’t need much beyond that to begin. But maybe the lists and recipe below will be useful to you. (And if you make it to the essay below the lists, I hope there are some helpful bits of wisdom in there, too.)

On Saturday, June 28th, I’m teaching a natural dye workshop at La Esquinita (formerly River Garden Park) in Los Angeles as part of a community workday tending the park’s Ethnobotanical Garden. The event is in partnership with Test Plot and Mujeres de la Tierra and the workshop will feature a translator for Spanish speakers. For more information and a link to sign up (or join the waitlist), go here.

California Dye Plants

Introduced (Non-Native) Plants

• Butterfly bush (Buddleja davidii)

• Castor leaves & stems (Ricinus communis)

• Curly dock (Rumex crispus)

• Dyer’s woad (Isatis tinctoria)

• Eucalyptus spp.

• Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare)

• French broom (Genista monspessulana)

• Garland daisy (Glebionis coronaria)

• Himalayan blackberry (Rubus armeniacus)

• Peruvian pepper tree (Schinus molle)

• Pokeberry (Phytolacca americana)

• Purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria)

• Ragwort (Jacobaea vulgaris)

• Salt cedar (Tamarix ramosissima)

• Scabiosa/pincushion (Scabiosa atropupurea)

• Scotch broom (Cytisus scoparius)

• Sourgrass (Oxalis pes-caprae)

• Spanish broom (Spartium junceum)

• Sticky snakeroot (Ageratina adenophora)

• Tansy (Tanacetum vulgare)

• Tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima)

• Wattle (Acacia spp.)

• Yellow toadflax (Linaria vulgaris)

Native Plants

• Black walnut (Juglans californica)

• Coffeeberry (Frangula californica)

• Elderberry (Sambucus mexicana)

• Laurel sumac (Malosma laurina)

• Oak (Quercus spp.)

• Prickly pear (Opuntia spp.)

• Sagebrushes (Artemisia californica, A. tridentata)

• Toyon (Heteromeles arbutifolia)

• Wild tarragon (Artemisia dracunculus)

These lists are by no means complete accounts of California’s wild dye plants. They are lists of plants which I’ve personally worked with as natural dyes, or which I can confirm with a degree of certainty are dye potent.

Comment or reply with your favorite California dye plant, especially if you don’t see it listed here!

Leave a comment

On my website, you’ll find further guidance for working with the listed plants as dyes, along with recipes for mordanting textiles and modifying their dye colors. Scroll to the very end of this Almanac for my Master Dye Recipe to read how to brew dye from these (and other) plants.

Read more

The full May almanac is available to paid subscribers of this newsletter. I hope you enjoy!

Subscribe now

Harvesting Fennel: Beneficial Disturbances

The road follows the gently winding path of the creek, so I do too—heading upstream. Where it straightens out above the gorge, I scan the roadside for inflorescences. I conjure the shape in my mind’s eye: Many stalks springing from a central stem. Branched, and then branched again. At each end, a tiny torch alit with tiny yellow flowers. By mid-summer, the road will be entirely illuminated by them.

No new flower heads yet, but there are last season’s skeletons—hundreds of them. Sun-blackened umbels on towering dried stalks, nodding ghostily along the road. Each is an aerial marker of below ground growth: A fleshy taproot reaching three feet deep, alive, like an organ in the soil. Collecting water, nutrients, and energy; waiting.

Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) escaped cultivation in California at least a century and a half ago—its foliage may have scented the rooms of Spanish missions—and found a new home in our riparian corridors and rolling coastal scrub, in a climate and environment paralleling the plant’s native Mediterranean Basin.

This spring has been intermittently damp and chilly, so growth is slow. A few plants have sprung to life by the river’s edge; short feathery shoots encircling last season’s dead stems as if in a slow ritual. The dance will speed up once days grow longer and warmer, when yellow mists of flowers—yielding tens to hundreds of thousands of seeds per mature plant1—will cover the riverbanks and hover along the coast.

Crush a fresh fennel sprig and smell the sweet anise and licorice, from organic compounds anethole and estragole in the plant’s essential oils. Most of fennel’s color potency comes from luteolin, a flavonoid2 named after the ubiquitous dyer’s plant Reseda luteola (known as weld or dyer’s rocket). For proof of the color latent throughout fennel’s circulatory system, look to the flowers; when they are at their yellow apex, so is the whole plant’s dye potency.

As their name suggests, anise swallowtail butterflies (Papilio zelicaon) are attracted to host plants which emit the anise-y compound anethole. Some native plant species in the carrot family (Apiaceae) like Lomatium, or biscuitroots, are hosts to the butterflies, but the insects do not discriminate between native and non-native species, and commonly lay their eggs and feed on fennel plants. From Nature Collective:

As fennel spread through the state, so did the anise swallowtail, even following the host plant into more developed habitats not previously occupied by the butterfly. More recently, as the number of fennel habitats in urban areas (mostly vacant lots) has begun to decrease, the population of anise swallowtails in developed areas is beginning to decline again.

Both the plant’s presence and our attempts to mitigate it have ecological consequences. On Santa Cruz Island, removal of fennel resulted in an increase in the population of side-blotched lizards, but a decrease of southern alligator lizards. In grasslands infested by fennel, frugivorous bird diversity has increased, as the birds use the plants’ stems as perches. Where fennel establishes in California, plant community composition and structure are inevitably changed, and biodiversity generally declines.

We become part of the ecology of every environment we inhabit. When we harvest plants for dye or other purposes, we create ecological disturbances—as do animals foraging for food. As did Native Californian basketmakers who meticulously shaped their environments, tending to the health of place, plant, and people, as all were one. (And still are.)

Fennel resprouts readily when cut, grazed, or burned. To remove the plants in earnest would mean uprooting many earthbound taproots, further disrupting habitat and soil. Simply removing a monoculture creates an ecological vacuum, inviting further germination of fennel and other opportunists.

A study on Santa Cruz Island of managing invasive fennel populations found that complete removal was “often followed by the invasion of other exotic plant species that continued to inhibit native plant species.” Interestingly, the study found the “[r]ecovery of native species is greatest with a 30 to 40% reduction in fennel cover.” Cutting back fennel at this rate made space for native perennial species to return, fostering a natural succession mimicking the area’s pre-invasion vegetation—native shrubs and trees—rather than toward non-native annual grassland.3

Beneficial disturbances initially disrupt ecological status quo, but they have the potential to carve out novel, niche-rich habitats, ultimately ushering in increased biodiversity. Like the tight weave of an expertly made basket, these intricate environments can weather inevitable future disturbances. Complex ecosystems are resilient ecosystems.

My harvests by hand are partly symbolic. I can’t remove the fennel roots and knit the land back together like nitrogen-fixing deerweed or lupine. But when I collect fennel in flower—checking first for swallowtail eggs and larvae—it means this patch of land will see one fewer generation of soil-stored seeds. My disturbance is small, yet potent as the fennel seeds themselves, and in favor of a future richer and more resilient for all its complexity.

Dyeing with Fennel—Golden Yellow and Green

Fennel leaves, stems, and flowers contain luteolin, a source of colorfast yellow dye most potent in summer when the flowers are at peak bloom. The leaves and stems also have some tannin and iron content, which with a longer brewing time will perform their own self-“saddening”4 magic—changing a pot of yellow dye liquid to deep, almost-black—resulting in a really pretty pea green color on fabric.

At the very bottom of this Almanac entry you’ll find a compilation of interesting and entertaining plant lore, as well as suggestions for culinary uses for wild fennel—not only is the whole plant dye-potent, it’s also entirely edible.

I hope you enjoy, and please let me know your results if you try the dye recipe below.

Read more

It was dawn and I couldn’t keep sleeping, so I went to the beach. The sky was slate and the ocean was silver. I walked until I was stopped by a break in the damp sand which was moving and alive—a river meeting the ocean. Something brighter than the glinting sea and more colorful than the muted dawn waited just beyond the crossing, but I couldn’t see it yet.

I’ve returned to this place many times. At high tide, the river and ocean waters meet and wash together in a great brackish lake, erasing a whole section of sandy beach as they swell and swirl and foam, becoming one. At low tide—low, low tide—they recede again to their separate sides, except for one long limb of the river, faithfully reaching for the ocean and re-carving its channel through the sand each day.

The morning I couldn’t sleep, the tide was low. Low low, but I didn’t know that. I moved along the foggy bluff dotted with ghostly Monterey pines—relics from another time1—and down to the emerging shore, to peer into tidepools and turn over stones. Where the river stopped me in my path, I took off my shoes and crossed. I was on a small island, a sliver of newborn beach exposed by the negative tide. On the island there was a rough pinkish shell, banded and spotted with algae, face down on the dark sand.

The shell was bigger than my hand. Actually, I needed both hands to turn it over—was it suctioned to the sand?—and gasped at what I saw inside. A frenzy of purple and blue and green iridescence flashed against the dull dawn. On top, four holes arced in a perfect row where light danced in. It was a huge abalone shell.

At dawn the next day we waded in the river to reach the sandbar, uncovering glowing shards around the brackish lake’s edges. We found two more whole shells, all red abalone (Haliotis rufescens); one with a mostly pearly white iridescence inside, another aglow with luminous pinks.

Again, years later, I can’t sleep past dawn, so I rise and follow an undulating V of brown pelicans flying over the bluffs and toward the beach. The ocean is still except for a few small waves where the fins of a pod of dolphins cut through the water. On the shore, iridescent bits of mussel and black turban snail shells dot the lines of past high tides. Where the river and ocean meet, there are no abalone. I check the stretch of shoreline multiple times, at first and second tides each day. Only small radiant shards wash up.

Seven species of abalone once populated the intertidal zones and kelp forests of California’s coast in the millions. These large sea snails (and their shells)—including red abalone, the largest species in the world—are culturally, nutritionally, and ritually important to Chumash and other Native Californian peoples. Six of the seven species of abalone in California are now critically endangered. White abalone will likely go extinct in our lifetime.

Climate change, historical over-harvesting, disease, habitat loss—the ocean grows warmer, more acidic, less hospitable and alarmingly empty of abalone. Commercial fishing of the edible snails has been outlawed in California for decades. Recreational fishing has been allowed under limited circumstances in limited locations—no fishing south of the San Francisco Bay; shore collecting and free diving only—but that’s also been halted as abalone populations continue to decline.

There are a couple of people in sea kayaks out fishing the edge of the kelp forest, probably catching surfperch or rockfish. Some otters are nearby, too, picking urchins from the bull kelp. Beyond the dark forested water, a humpback whale suddenly breaches, its whole body in flight, right dorsal fin reaching for the sky—an enormous splash of mist emits as the whale dives and disappears again below the water’s metallic sheen.

Abalone are particularly sensitive to ocean chemistry. They make their shells—and, amazingly, repair them—by collecting calcium and carbonates from their environment and secreting resulting calcium carbonate (CaCO3) from their mantle. As humans emit more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the ocean absorbs the excess, and solubility of carbonate increases, as does pH of the water (acidification). Shell-forming organisms struggle to obtain carbonate under these conditions, and their ability to build and repair their shells diminishes.2

It’s possible the shells we found a few springs ago did not come directly from the ocean—not the ocean we know today. They may have traveled downriver from a midden disassembled by that season’s powerful rains and floods. Maybe all the old shells have found new homes downstream—glowing below the flowing river, or back home on the ocean floor. Some have broken into fragments, never to be made whole again. But others remain intact, like the habitats of the past—increasingly rare and incredibly precious.