Blooming orange

Coreopsis and cosmos dyes on kozo paper

This month I am diving into another vibrant colour: orange. I often use orange in my work, but I also like to wear it sometimes, mostly as an accent colour. I think it works well with many other colours. It invigorates and brings a warm and strong vibe. I think most of the time, small touches of orange are best.  Maybe it is the designer in me speaking 😊 but it pairs with so many colours, for example brown for that retro look. Think about the 70’s. Orange and blue complement and highlight each other. It suggests a calm day with a twist of happiness. That’s all we want isn’t it?

You can get orange from different plants. Interestingly yellow is a more easily sourced plant colour. The two plants I mostly use are coreopsis and cosmos flowers, as I grow them in my garden. Although last year, I had little cosmos. They are both beautiful blooming flowers and the more you pick them, the more they grow.  I harvest the flowers during the growing season, late summer, and store them for later use. They are wonderful to use during the winter season as they bring that special warm sunshine feeling.

Both belong to the flavonoid’s family, like many other plants giving yellow and orange. They are originally from America. They were used in ancient civilisations in central America and south America for dyes.

Cosmos (cosmos sulphureus) called also Mexican aster or coreopsis sulphur :

Native to central America, cosmos was introduced to Europe in the 18th century. It was used by the Aztecs before the Spanish Conquest as a dye but also as a pigment for painting. The plant grows up to 1.10m and has a long flowering period, from summer until autumn. It is beautiful when dried too. It can give yellow, orange, reddish tones depending on the flower colour. It contains a lot of yellow dyes called apigenine (flavone), coreopsine (chalcone) and sulfuretine (aurone). You just remove the top part of the flower and use fresh or dry. The young leaves are edible also. As my garden did not give me many last year, I obtained some beautiful cosmos from Le Champ des Couleurs, grown in the sunny Provence, where they grow the amazing organic indigo that I use also in my work (subject for another post).
To make a cosmos dye bath: do a decoction at 80C for about 30/40 mins. It is good to let it macerate in water a day before that process. Cosmos dyes are sensible to water PH. For a more intense orange, you can alkaline the dye bath with bicarbonate of soda. When using alum as a mordant or to make pigment, it will brighten the colour.

Coreopsis
(coreopsis tinctoria) called also Tickseed and  (coreopsis grandiflora) :

These two types of coreopsis are well known for dyeing, but there are several others that work well too. They originate from Peru. They grow easily and there are more than 450 species of them in the world. They can grow up to 1m high and their flowering season last long when you pick the flowers.

To make the dye bath, it is the same process as for the cosmos. You can extract the pigments from the dye bath to use on paper for printing or painting. You will need alum and bicarbonate of soda for this process. To make the print paste, just add some gum arabic.

Other sources of orange:
Of course, they are other flowers which produce orange such as the Dalhia (variabilis and pinnata). Some marigolds (tagetes patula L. and erecta L.) can give some orange, but I found so far that they give more a yellow bronze colour than a bright orange. You can get orange from non-European sources as well such as the bark of the Osage orange tree (North and central America) and from the seeds of the Bixa Orellana shrub (central America). Some stockists in France supply these.
If you are looking for a more orange copper tone, you can use onion skins, rhubarb leaves or henna leaves.

A little history :

Coreopsis, cosmos, dahlia, marigold are all native to the Americas. They were sources of yellow and orange dyes in various civilisations in central and south America. The use of these flowers by Indigenous Americans, before the arrival of the Europeans, is not well documented. There are no surviving records as these were destroyed by the colonizers. The oldest, existing written document from 1552 by Martinus de la Cruz and Johannes Badianus illustrates several dye plants. It was written in  classical Nahuati, the language of the Aztecs and widely spoken in Mexico.

I hope this gives you an overview of these beautiful flowers that you can grow, or maybe you have already in your garden. Using the flowers to make your own colours is more than making a dye bath or extracting their pigments. It is about connecting with them. It is about the sowing, the care, watching them grow, watching them blossom, the harvest. They bring you closer to nature, our energy source. Dye plants always contain several dye molecules which give the dyed material its richness. It is not the case with colours obtained from synthetic colours which deliver only one simple pure colour, often issued from petrol chemistry and containing carbon. ( I mentioned in my previous blog the introduction of synthetic colours in 19eC with the colouring molecules discovered in Germany). Plant based colours always harmonize between themselves, due to their dyes combination.

I hope you enjoyed reading about these bright flowers. Again, this is just an overview. Any question or comment give me a shout. I ‘ll be happy to help if I can.

Fabienne