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In practice
Understanding Dye
The dye function describes a plant that yields colour for textiles, basketry, leather or paint. The colour may sit in the root, as in madder and turmeric; in the leaf, as in indigo and weld; in the bark, hull or heartwood, as in walnut and osage orange; or in flowers and fruit, which are usually the least lightfast of the group.
Most plant dyes need a mordant - commonly alum, iron or tannin - to bond the colour to the fibre and keep it there through washing and sunlight. A dye garden is therefore planned in pairs: the colour source and the mordant source. Tannin-rich plants such as oak, sumac and rhubarb leaf earn a place for that reason alone.
Indigo is the exception worth knowing about, because it is not dissolved and bound like the others but fermented into a soluble form, absorbed, and then oxidised back to an insoluble blue in open air. It is the only reliable plant blue, and it is the reason a dye garden looks different from a herb garden: the process, not the plant, sets the scale.
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