Dye Garden at The Greenhouse Project
I planted a dye garden at the Riverside Community Garden in the summer of 2021, next to Vicki Winters' indigo plants. I grew weld, woad, safflower, amaranth, dyers chamomile, yarrow, cosmos, calendula, coreopsis, Japanese murasaki, and madder root.
Two years later, Shane Scopatz helped me build a terraced garden space as part of the Greenhouse Project at the UCSC Farm in Santa Cruz, and I transplanted some of the madder there. The madder took off, and then weld, sweet annie, feverfew, and cleavers—all dye plants—appeared as volunteers. Later we also planted marigold, cosmos, chamomile, sage, rosemary, yarrow, murasaki, black sweet scabious, echinacea, and calendula, but the madder and the weld are the happiest so far, and we have harvested and held collective dye events with both.
The Greenhouse Project was created by L. Gilbert and Dav Bell in 2022 as part of their work in the Environmental Art and Social Practice graduate program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Located at the Center for Agroecology at UCSC, it is an intergenerational community space that centers art, food, and climate justice. The site features an outdoor exhibition, classroom, and performative space, as well as a 1-acre native plant garden. The Greenhouse Project Collective now programs events and maintains the space.
Zapotec-American artist Porfirio Gutierrez gave us a dye workshop with cochineal and péricon in spring 2025. The Materiality of Color class that I taught at UCSC provided the initial motivation to create a dye garden, and re-locating it to the Greenhouse Project space makes it more accessible to collaboration. Dima Mabsout and Fernanda Rappa have helped to maintain the dye garden, which is constantly in progress.