Indigo Garden London

Image: From Made in Japan. All other images courtesy of Indigo Garden London.

In this guest post Liza Mackenzie and Luisa Uribe, textile artists from Indigo Garden London, a new initiative to promote natural dyeing, tell us about their plans to get more Londoners involved in textile practice. Indigo Garden London is London’s first Indigo garden dedicated to promoting slow and sustainable textile dyeing. Working with local communities this space will act as an educational garden and workshop for learning how to grow, extract and dye with the plants. We are passionate about Indigo and promoting sustainable textile practice through hands on making experiences.

Image: Persicaria Tinctoria - Japanese Indigo seeds ready for drying and storing until it’s time to sow in spring, Indigo Garden London

When people are able to touch and see where natural colour comes from and the process of extracting it for themselves we believe they start to create a more qualitative relationship to the materials surrounding them and the relationship between us and nature. The pandemic left many people isolated during lockdown and our collective mental health has suffered as a result. Being in nature and gardening has been one of the few salvations for us personally and we are grateful to be able to share the positive benefits of working in nature with more people. Opening a community Indigo garden allows us to educate others on the healing benefits of slow craft and to bring the alchemic science of dyeing to life through communal Art making.

The growing season will start in spring. We’ll be growing more than one variety of Japanese indigo (Persicaria Tinctoria). By early summer we'll be able to use fresh leaves for dyeing turquoise shades and making direct leaf prints. We expect to do three full harvests throughout summer-autumn to extract our first local indigo pigment; for this, we will be implementing an aqueous fermentation process on-site. We’ll make sustainable indigo vats with our London-grown pigment to dye fabric in various sessions throughout summer. In late autumn comes the end of the season, where we'll harvest seeds and prepare the soil to start our dye garden all over again in 2022.