Growing Colour Garden

Our clothes are often coloured with synthetic dyes. These require huge amounts of energy and water to make and can result in chemicals being discharged into water systems. Instead, this project explores plant-based dyes. Natural dyes have been used across the world for millennia, each region using different local plants. As part of community life, the knowledge of how to nurture the soil used to produce these dyes has been passed down from generation to generation.

Staff and students at the RCA are increasingly interested in natural dyes and the end-to-end process of growing and using plants for dyeing. Growing Colour Garden aims to help the students at the Royal College of Art and  museum visitors connect their creative practice to the natural world and to human history. 

The RCA had been exploring opportunities to grow dye plants on our Kensington campus, but appropriate, sunny space was limited especially as we entered a period of major refurbishment. Through South Ken ZEN+, we discovered that the Design Museum were seeking partners for projects in the Dame Sylvia Crowe Garden. And so, the Growing Colour Garden was born.

Incidentally, a previous project in the Garden, the Growing Together project, was also a collaboration with the RCA’s Design Age Institute!

Technicians in the RCA’s Textiles Workshops collaborated with the Design Museum staff and volunteers to plan and develop the Growing Colour Garden. Dye plants were grown from seed at the RCA, and planted out in the Design Museum Garden by RCA staff and students. 

In the Growing Colour Garden, there is now plants including indigo, madder, marigold and others, which produce shades of blue, pink and yellow. ​These plants have been harvested and brought back to the RCA Textiles Workshops to be used for dyeing fabrics. The process was recorded so students can reference the processes including planting and growing from seed, planting out, maintenance, harvesting colour and seed saving.

The RCA and the Design Museum have run a natural dye printing workshop with local residents and welcomed garden volunteers to the RCA for a tour. The RCA has also assisted one of the Design Museum's Designers in Residence at Future Observatory (the museum's national research programme focused on the green transition and sustainable design) with a workshop utilising dye plants grown in the garden.

This project has been a fantastic collaboration bringing together staff, students and local residents together. The Growing Colour Garden has increased awareness amongst these groups of the possibility of using plant-based dyes while also supporting wellbeing through garden.