Dye Garden
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The dye garden contains a small botanical collection of plant were used by our forefathers for dyeing cloth. Many plants were used throughout the British Isles and here are some of the most important. Different parts of the plant would be used for dyeing. Sometimes, it's roots, the bark, the leaves or the flowers. Some plants had to be harvested at a particular time of year to get the best use of colour from the plant. Among the most important plants we have here are madder, which used the roots to obtain a red shade, Weld which was used to dye yellow or green, and woad which was used to dye blue. There were great fields of woad down in Essex and Sussex. You might have heard of the expression Lavenham Blue which comes from the village of the same name down there, famous for its growing of woad. the parts of a plant would be typically chopped up and mashed then heated in water to extract the colour from the plant matter to obtain the dye liquor. Then a mordant would be added to the to the cloth, the mordant would help fix the colour from the dye liquor onto the cloth.
