Since working on Land Unlost I’ve been paying a bit more attention to technologies of the past. The color blue is rare in nature, yet famously used throughout antiquity from ancient Egyptians to Celts, and strikingly by the Nora tribe in Horizon Zero Dawn (seen above).
The blue/indigo dye came from woad, a plant. I always assumed “Dyer’s Woad” had blue petals or blue berries or some other blue pigment but it doesn’t, it’s just regular green like any other plant. Even its flowers are an unexceptional yellow. So when you dye your cloth (or Nora rope) in your leafy woad concoction it just comes out leafy green …but then before your eyes it transforms into blue! Like a Polaroid picture! (Or more accurately; like an initially pale apple-core changing color to brown from exposure to air.)
Green transforming into blue was more interesting than I expected woad to be. When looking further I also noticed that woad grows wild in my area — and is classified as a noxious weed — so maybe I can find some and try the process myself?!
Heading into winter it’s the worst time of year to try to find any (its mostly dead above the surface at this time), so I used the time-slider feature of Google Earth to look around the landscapes here at different times of year. From the seasonal changes I found what look like patches of it, though I’ll have to hike there to confirm. More recently while walking nearby, up a loose dirt bank I noticed what looked like the dead remains of the plant (it lives for 1-2 years), and paying closer attention it looked like there were some small fresh sprouts of green underneath.
Getting closer was tricky (I almost made it up the bank then the dirt crumbled underneath me and I slid back down, scratching my arms because I wasn’t wearing sleeves. On the third attempt I got close enough for an awkward photo. I’ve never seen the plant in person so I have little confidence I can identify it, but the sprouts did show identifiers of early-growth woad (rosette with pale midveins), and given why I initially noticed them I think there’s a fair chance it’s the right plant.
I’ll return in the spring when it will be more obvious (and there might be something to harvest!)