vi Foraging for Colour Marissa Stoffer

Autumn’s whiskers

Marissa Stoffer

As an artist, I’m on a journey. It’s a journey of understanding place and ecology by foraging for colour. This journey allows me to tend to my health by slowing down, being in nature, observing, learning, and experimenting. I invite you to join me— to discover the natural colours found in local plants, lichen, and fungi; to learn more about our surroundings through observation, and creativity. So, let’s walk….

Imagine it’s autumn; exposed skeletal trees, rustic carpets of leaves, golden hues, mist, vapour, fog, boots in leafy hummus. Smell the earth. Look around as the season opens your senses and reveals the density of moss, lichen, and liverwort usually camouflaged by foliage. Their presence is magnified, exposed by the natural cycle of decomposition and change. Autumn is the best time of year to collect Usnea spp (Old Man’s Beard)— a type of lichen which hangs off old tree branches, sometimes by the metre. Old Man’s Beard is quite abundant in Scotland where the air is purest. Observing its growth and distribution provokes all sorts of questions about air quality and microclimates. But Old Man’s Beard is a slow grower. That’s why the strands should only be collected as gifts from the woodland floor, when they’ve fallen after heavy winds and rains. For me, discovering Old Man’s Beard turned an autumn walk into a colour— a useful outcome, which led me to learn more about lichen, making species recognition easier. Lichens are such complex organisms, and there are many questions yet to be answered, so I hope you’ll be inspired to look deeper into their mysterious world.

Scotland has a rich history of natural dyeing— especially with lichens, which once played a significant role in the Scottish economy. Lichens were used on both a domestic and commercial scale, notably on the world-famous Harris tweed. Natural dyes are no longer efficient enough for today’s commercial production, so we commonly see synthetic colours. Although the traditional practices have faded, there is still much to be gained by foraging for colour. Colours from nature can rival synthetics with their brilliance and lustre and can be extracted using simple household ingredients like water and mineral salts (known as mordants). You don’t need to use mordants for lichen dye extraction, as they often produce very brilliant colours on their own, but I’ll show you the results of both processes— and we’ll see how many shades Old Man’s Beard can yield. So, let’s begin with how the process works.

Extraction There are two ways of extracting colour from lichen. The first is an ammonia fermentation method. This is useful for those lichen that are rich in vitamin C. It takes three months of steeping in a 50:50 solution of ammonia and water, before straining and simmering. Although this sounds like a long process, the resulting shades of purples and reds are said to be well worth it. The second, and more user-friendly way to extract colour, is the water simmering method. I started with a small amount of lichen and wool for my test. In my experiments, wool and silk have absorbed lichen dye best, but it is possible that plant fibres may work with other lichens. Before starting, you will want to wash your wool or silk using a PH neutral soap to remove any natural oils, then soak them in clean water for a minimum of one hour. Now follow these simple steps… Step 1: Soak the lichen (I used 15g) in boiled water and leave to steep overnight in a stainless-steel or glass pot. The amount of water does not need to be precise; it just needs to be enough to cover the lichens and the fibre you’ll be adding later. Step 2: Simmer the Old Man’s Beard in a pot for one hour. Step 3: Strain out the lichen, or simply add your wool to the dye water and simmer for a further hour. Do not let your dye liquid boil, or the colour will burn and spoil.

Step 4: Allow to cool, leaving the whole to soak overnight in the dye liquid. Step 5: Drain, wash your fabric in PH neutral soap, and air dry.

Alterations You can play with colours by using mordants such as Allum, Baking Soda, Iron, and Copper. For best results, separate the dye liquid from your first dye extraction into small batches, adding more water if required. Add a ½ teaspoon of your mordant into the liquid of one of the batches. Then add your wet fabric and repeat the process of simmering in the mordanted dye liquid for 20-30 minutes, then leave to soak overnight to intensify the colour. For bright colours, you’ll need an equal weight of dye material to fabric. For my tests, I used only a small amount of each. If you don’t have enough dye material to match the weight of your fabric, don’t worry— the colours will simply come out fainter, which could be desirable.

Here’s my recipe from an experimental batch of dyeing: Ingredients 15g Old Man’s Beard 2½ pints of water 15g wool ½ tsp of mordants: Allum, Baking Soda, Iron, Copper Results Old Man’s Beard yielded a fine range of autumnal colours, from orange to different shades of brown, depending on the mordant I used.

Images: Marissa Stoffer

Christmas tree philosophy

Ramsey Affifi

Holiday season behind us, I walk down the street. Christmas trees are strewn across the pavements for collection. Well, that is the way we talk about it, at least. That these trees have had their root systems lobbed off doesn’t seem to bother holiday merrymakers, perhaps because that part of the tree is invisible anyway. But roots are complex structures comprising a significant quantity of a tree’s mass and volume. And so, it must be asked: in what sense do we really decorate ‘trees’? Soaked in water, the tree continues to perform in minimal ways we think make it a tree; it sits there, stays green for a while, and emits fragrance from its resins. But like believing a corpse is merely sleeping because his nails and hair are still growing, are we oblivious to a macabre spectacle? What is lost when roots are cut off?

In his last decades, Charles Darwin was increasingly devoted to studying plants. He wrote a number of illuminating but less wellknown books on flowers, plant evolution and behaviour. Co-written with his son, On the power of movement in plants (1880) was his penultimate study. Its last few pages propose an arresting hypothesis that laid largely buried for over a hundred years. After conducting several experiments— pressing or burning root tip apices and examining subsequent changes to plant growth —they noticed an interesting phenomenon. If burnt on one side of a root tip, the plant’s aerial parts would grow the other way, even though this response would not occur were it burnt anywhere else (including further up the root). Injured plants seem to respond as a whole to local impacts on individual root tips. The root tips, they surmised, therefore play a special role in picking up relevant information and centralising a coordinated whole-organism response to it. The Darwins concluded root apices functioned analogously to a simple brain. Is it absurd to use neural analogies to understand plants? Some assert it is plainly so (e.g., Alpi et al., 2007). But many metaphors used to describe neurons and their synapses were themselves borrowed from botany. Consider ‘arborisation’, ‘dendrite branching’ (double whammy there), and neural ‘pruning’: if plants prove an effective source to describe aspects of neurons, why deem it anthropomorphic (or animal-centric) to go the other way and investigate how neural thinking might better help us understand plants?

The Darwins’ intriguing idea remained uprooted until the rise of contemporary plant behaviour and signalling research (Baluska et al, 2009). According to these authors, plants are analogous to animals with their heads buried in the soil. Superficially, this seems to make sense— at least according to our mental image of the typical animal and the typical plant —roots, like mouths and nostrils, are where plants take in nutrients and gases from the air, while leaves and flowers are excretory and sexual organs respectively. However, the more important question is not to what extent the upside-down analogy is roughly true, but how much the root system really does coordinate responses to information a plant receives. One way to approach this question is anatomical. Is the root system organised (or not) ‘like’ a brain? The point is not to find specific similarities. For instance, a chemical that serves as a neurotransmitter in an animal might be doing things broadly served by a different chemical in a plant. On the other hand, that neurotransmitter might exist in plants but be involved in totally unrelated activities. The anatomical approach seeks correlations in structure and function between brains and roots.

This approach immediately leads to a problem. Root system architecture tends to be vertical. Roots break into smaller roots, and so on, without evident channels between them— in obvious contrast to the messy, circular and

interconnected nature of neurons in a brain. Lateral connections between parts of the brain are reinforced or atrophy— facilitated, reinforced or softened through use and disuse. It seems intuitive that lateral connections between roots would be a minimum structural requirement for an organ whose function is to coordinate information, because otherwise it would seem hampered by the siloing constraints of its shape. Can something like this be found between a plant’s roots? Perhaps we ought to look at root hairs (and their associated mycelia) as such flexible lateral structures. Like neurons, root hairs are usually long singlecelled structures. Their copious growth means they certainly come into contact with other hairs of their own, or other roots. Root hairs grow and atrophy relatively quickly and easily. Looking at the growth of root hairs might be analogous to dendrite branching, while volatile organic compounds released in the soil regions between root hairs might be roughly synaptic. One concerns transmission along linear tissue, the other across spaces between such tissue. Sadly, research into communicative activity in root hairs is virtually non-existent.

Nevertheless, there is no point in looking for anatomical structures that might be organised like neural networks if no behaviour warrants the search for these structures in the first place. For this reason, a second area of research has to do with plant behaviour. It is certainly the case that coordinated plant responses are welldetailed and commonplace. A lot of plant coordination is owed to the release of hormones, such as jasmonate and auxin. This is not the kind of integrated activity we would be looking for in an organism with something brain-like about it. Instead, we would be looking for a globally coherent activity that involved differentiated responses amongst its parts. For instance, we might look for electric signals transmitted between cells, leading to local but coordinated responses. Electric signalling has been known in plants since even before Darwin’s experiments. Like Darwin’s root apices, its significance was also downplayed until evidence could no longer be ignored (Davies 2006). Action potential, for example, is now recognised as pervasive in plants. More detailed studies into signal transduction in roots, cambium, and other tissue that extends throughout the plant body is needed.

A second issue is that coordinated plant responses do not appear to be as coordinated as, say, those in vertebrates. In investigating plant responses to stimuli, what level of centralising is needed to deem it ‘brain-like control’? Plants may be more decentralised than vertebrates, responding to their worlds more like a confederacy than a dictatorship (Firn, 2004). Response may be either at the cellular level, the tissue level or something more global— depending on the situation. An organism is likely to centralise its response to the extent it needs to, and plants may not need to— or at least not need to as much. But we should be wary of drawing dichotomies across kingdoms. Animal behaviour is not equally centralised across its phylla, either. By any anthropocentric measure, octopuses are highly intelligent— but they have more neurons in their arms than in their heads. On the other hand, citing Shomrat and Levin (2013), mycologist Merlin Sheldrake (2020) points out that flatworms are able to regrow brains once their heads have been cut off, and retain memories of their prior experiences.

When very young, some conifer cuttings can grow new roots, but not once the tree is big enough to wrap with tinsel and adorn with red balls. It would seem only small and simple bodies can get by without brains— or roots — long enough to sprout fresh ones. With or without an artificial supply of nutrients, such trees slowly die. Whatever it is, something more fundamental than a flatworm’s brain was taken from these firs and pines, their colours dull and bodies brittle, awaiting pick-up above pools of dry needles.

References Alpi, A. et al. (2007) ‘Plant neurobiology: No brain, no gain?’ TRENDS in Plant Science 12 (4): 135-136 Baluska, F.; Mancuso, S.; Volkmann, D. & Barlow, P. W. (2009) ‘The “root-brain” hypothesis of Charles and Francis Darwin: Revival after more than 125 years.’ Plant Signaling & Behavior, 4(12): 1121–1127 Darwin, C and Darwin, F. (1880) On the power of movement in plants. John Murray: Edinburgh Davies, E. (2006) ‘Electrical Signals in Plants: Facts and Hypotheses,’ in Volkov A.G. (ed.) Plant Electrophysiology. Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg. Firn, R. (2004) ‘Plant intelligence: an alternative point of view,’ in Annals of Botany, 93(4): 345–351 Sheldrake, M. (2020) Entangled Life. The Bodley Head: London Shomrat, T. & Levin, M. (2013) ‘An automated training paradigm reveals long-term memory in planarians and its persistence through head regeneration,’ in The Journal of Experimental Biology, 216(20): 3799 LP – 3810 Trewawas, A. (2015) Plant behaviour and intelligence. Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK

Trim and tidy

Ruth Crighton-Ward

Slowly but surely, we are creeping towards the end of winter. Already there are signs of new life in the garden— Crocus (Crocus tommasinianus), Primula (Primula vulgaris). There are buds on the trees, even if they have not yet started to grow leaves. There is a sense of anticipation in nature.

This is a good time to get on with the winter tidy and ready the garden for the coming spring. Make sure the tools you use are clean and sharp. Tears in branches caused by blunt tools can lead to infection and disease. Also, ensure you have the correct tools for the job; don’t strain to cut a branch with secateurs, when a pair of loppers or a pruning saw would be quicker, and more efficient.

Cut back any herbaceous plants that have died down over autumn and winter, trimming them to just a few centimetres from ground level. Shrub roses can be pruned right down to about two feet from ground level. Now is a good time to do them— catching them while they are still dormant, and just before the new growing season starts. Now is also the perfect time for winter pruning of certain trees. Free-standing Apple (Malus spp.) and Pear (Pyrus spp.) trees are best pruned now, to ensure optimum fruiting. When pruning trees and shrubs, there are certain rules to follow— regardless of the plant. Watch out for the DDDDXR; the dead, dying, damaged, diseased, crossing and rubbing. Any branches which display any of these traits should be removed. If trees are not pruned, then their branches can become spindly and congested, resulting in a reduced fruit yield and common diseases, such as on canker and scab. When complete, the framework of the tree should form a goblet shape, which allows air to flow freely through it. Trees which bear stone fruits such as Cherry (Prunus spp.) or Plum (Prunus domestica) should not be pruned at this time, but rather during summer. This will help prevent an infection called Silver Leaf— a fungal disease that shows in a silvering of the leaf and can often be fatal. Any trees which are fan-trained or grown as espaliers will also prefer a summer pruning.

Although we talked about plant division back in the autumn, we can now look at some bulb division. Snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) which have finished flowering can be dug up and divided into smaller clumps. It’s a good time to do this when the foliage is still evident, so you know where they are. Replant them to create more clumps for next year. This method can be repeated later in the year with later flowering bulbs, such as Daffodils (Narcissus spp.). Deciduous shrubs can be transplanted during this time if they are in the wrong place. Again, it’s good to do this whilst they remain dormant.

Shrubs which flowered over the winter can also be cut back now. This will help to keep the shape of the plant. Some examples include Winter Flowering Jasmine (Jasminum nudiflorum) and winter Heathers (Calluna vulgaris). Heathers should be given a light trim to remove the dead flowers, but not cut back severely or to exposed wood— unless you need to remove diseased parts, or prevent a particular section from growing because it’s impeding another plant. A good shrub to cut back now is Dogwood (Cornus spp.). Cornus is a plant which needs to be cut back on an annual basis to prevent it running rampant in the garden. Save its bright red or yellow stems for a vase— they make a beautiful indoor decoration, adding a welcome splash of colour to a bare corner. Any remaining stems of Honesty (Lunaria annua) can also be cut back. Consider combining the Honesty with the Dogwood in your vase, contrasting the colour of the Dogwood with the papery silveriness of the Honesty. Or you can remove the papery discs covering the Honesty seeds and keep them to try your hand at cultivation.

Certain seeds, such as brassicas and Onions (Allium spp.) can now be sown. For quicker germination, seeds should be sown in a heated propagator, or indoors where seed trays can be left on a window ledge. It is still too early to sow seeds directly into the ground. In unheated greenhouses, certain plants can still be sown. Be aware that they will germinate more slowly and sporadically, though, so it is perhaps a good idea to sow more than you would in a heated one. However, the seeds that do germinate in an unheated greenhouse will be hardier, will not become spindly and leggy, and are less prone to diseases such as Damping Off. This is a fungal disease, carried in soil, which causes seedlings to collapse and die. You can help to prevent it through good cleanliness with seed trays and tools, sterile compost and not overwatering the seedlings.

Medicinal plants which can be sown early in the year include Feverfew (Tanacetum parthenium), Lemon Balm (Melissa officianalis) and Thyme (Thymus vulgaris). Feverfew is used as a treatment for migraine headaches, stomach aches, toothache and insect bites, to name a few of its talents. It has the added benefit of being a beautiful ornamental plant, bearing a proliferation of white petalled flowers with yellow centres. Its leaves are highly aromatic.

Finally, February is a good time to get all those jobs done that we never seem to find the time for during the rest of the year. For instance, clearing areas which have become congested with branches and debris from fallen trees. I’m sure most of us have a list of those jobs we just keep putting off. Next month we’ll look in more depth at sowing seeds and growing mediums, as the growing season begins in earnest.