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Growing Your Own Ink Scouring the Suburbs At first I collected as many plant specimens as possible from wherever I could find them: local parks, gardens and stretches of waste and derelict land. Oddly enough living in the suburbs of a large city like London is probably the best place to be for plant collecting, it’s full of peculiar characters trying to grow all manner of technically un-growable plants, inadvertently providing us with an unexpected range of available colour sources. Once the word got round people began to bring me plant samples too. I was particularly grateful to both Sue Minter of the Chelsea Physic Garden for her help with Selenium scabrum and with John Keesing from Kew Gardens for providing me with the seeds of Bixa orellano, a South American plant that produces a bright vermilion dye - used by the native inhabitants as cosmetics and by the western food industry for colouring cheese and margarine. During the summer and autumn of 1994, I collected around forty to fifty plant species and varieties and proceeded to test them for colour in the kitchen of my home in Dulwich. I should add, by way of warning, that this was not always to the great enthusiasm of my wife; some plants, when simmering away on the stove, tend to produce rather unfortunate aromas! Fruits like elderberry, blackberry, privet and the like I stored in a freezer until I was able to get a slightly more business-like ‘laboratory’ set up in the screen print area at Middlesex.
Phil Shaw MA(RCA) |
