Liz Spencer grew up in the Carolinas. Every year, the dogwood tree, with its flowers in white and shades of pink and its scent like honeysuckle, signaled spring. It so permeated her young life that when she began her natural dye business as a small-scale artisan—where she does everything by hand to coax color from plants to dye textiles, paper, wood, and other natural surfaces—she named herself the Dogwood Dyer.
In 2011, Liz was attending the London College of Fashion for a master’s degree in sustainability and fashion. There was a green space next to campus, and she thought to transform it into a garden to grow plants with dye. For over a year, she led a volunteer project to build the beds, start seeds, grow plants, and collect petals and leaves for color. She created dye baths, dyed scarves, and sold those scarves at a holiday fair to raise funds for next year’s seeds.
“It’s like I sort of began from seed, growing the plants before I had any experience with natural dyeing,” Liz says.
“It’s like I sort of began from seed, growing the plants before I had any experience with natural dyeing,”
But from there, she knew she’d never do anything else. There was so much to immerse in: not just the dyeing, but botany and horticulture, a holistic understanding of each plant each season, and color theory. And then there was all the history and culture of dye plants: where they came from, where they’ve been grown, the thousands of years of knowledge passed down. It felt limitless. “I love the whole process of growing to create a spectrum of color,” she says.
After London, Liz gardened in New York. Then she came to California, and built a new garden, where she’s been growing to create color for seven years now.
Liz thinks of herself primarily as a teacher. Dogwood Dyer offers an educational subscription, where subscribers receive a different tutorial each month that walks them through the whole of a specific technique or process, like block printing with natural dyes, how to create a dye garden, dyes with specific plants—cosmos, marigold, mushrooms, even dyes from food waste.
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“I’m personally a serial learner, where I like to learn one thing and then move to the next and then move to the next, while staying within natural dyes,” she says. It allows me to really dive deep within that world, but also keep it fresh and interesting.”
Liz also offers workshops and sells natural dye kits, seeds, and dried flowers. Her favorite plants to grow are the ones that offer the most challenging colors—and some of the most intriguing history. Yellow is common in the natural world. Red, surprisingly, not so much. And blue? Even rarer. There are only a dozen or so plants that create blue in the whole world. In her California garden, Liz grows Japanese indigo. It comes originally from China, and the Japanese people have used it for millennia, honing the process for extracting color. From it, Liz creates the most alluring shades of turquoise, jade, and aquamarine.
“Those colors are a combination of the sky and the plants. I find them quite magical,” she says.
“My work has recently evolved to more printing with plants. Taking the actual plant itself that you’ve created color from, and getting an imprint that will never be repeated”
Natural dyes aren’t as consistent and don’t last as long as synthetic dyes. But that’s the point. Where synthetic dyes come from petrochemicals, natural dyes are biodegradable. They won’t be around forever. Which makes each creation special.
“My work has recently evolved to more printing with plants. Taking the actual plant itself that you’ve created color from, and getting an imprint that will never be repeated because of the nature of the singular flowers and leaves that you’re printing with. And knowing that there’s nothing else like what you’ve created out in the world? That’s unique. One in million.”
Liz Spencer, www.thedogwooddyer.com
