Dyeing to help

IT often feels as if responsibility for saving the planet falls heavily on the shoulders of gardeners.

- John Hoyland

To dye for: the flowers of zinnias can be used to make dyes

Sometimes, the steps we are pressed to take are easy: not using peat is a no-brainer; it was not difficult to give up chemical pesticides and herbicides (although I do sometimes yearn for old-fashioned Rose Clear or an occasional spray of glyphosate); favouring pollen-rich flowers to encourage bees and butterflies is a delight. But sometimes, the demands feel like a step too far.

A visitor to the Glyndebourne gardens once wrote to me that there were far too many 'fancy flowers' in the gardens and that we should be concentrating on native plants. There is such a movement in America, but the glory of British gardens is not built on a few scrawny natives. My response was, of course, polite, but had the suggestion been made about my own garden I would have been much more blunt. Gardens are places of beauty and solace, not merely buttresses for an ailing environment.

It was against this background that one of Glyndebourne's gardeners, together with a member of the costume department, approached me with an idea to grow plants that could be used to dye textiles. My initial response was lukewarm. There are plenty of colourful fabrics to buy without dyeing our own and, secondly, I didn't want to fill the garden with the weedy plants that dyers use. I would learn that I was wrong, so wrong, on both counts.