One hot summer day a few years ago, I set off with a team of eight color-collecting ten-year-olds, each equipped only with a canvas bag and a decent supply of sunscreen. It was my son’s birthday, and he’d asked for an inkmaking workshop. Otis, one of my son’s best friends, is a creative redhead whose interests range from the creation of alphabets to Korean subway systems to crafting graphic novels from the periodic table of elements. While the other kids were foraging for the more expected sources of color, like rose petals stolen from our neighbors’ gardens and ripe mulberries fallen from a nearby tree, Otis was looking at the ground: “Can we make ink out of these?” He had collected dozens of cigarette butts from the sidewalk on our way to the park. My answer, as always, was, “Yes! Let’s try it.” I have made ink from the flimsiest of ideas and the unlikeliest of materials. The cigarette butts, once cleaned, filtered, and harvested for their tobacco, became an almost golden-colored ink. I later combined it with rust and stinging nettle to create a most extraordinary two-toned ink, one that eventually made its way into the carry-on luggage of an artist who journeyed to the Arctic Circle on an icebreaker boat. Otis saw the potential for ink in less obvious places, but he also approached the craft without any awareness of its rules or limits, the sort of thinking that inevitably leads to beautifully unexpected results—my favorite kind. I try to embody that same spirit when I make ink.
“Let’s just try it and see what happens.” This attitude is so important. Not in a college-hipster potluck, “who cares what I put in this casserole?” way, but rather in a René Redzepi, “what will happen if I slowly bake this carrot for seven days, topping it with a dusting of woodruff flowers, sourced from the perimeter of the carrot patch?” kind of way that respects the ingredients and their sense of place. As you attempt the recipes I’ve included throughout this book, I hope you’ll always follow your curiosity wherever it leads you.
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What follows is a set of foundational tips that work with any inkmaking adventure. I encourage you to be creative and find your own process—it can be as complex or simple as you like. For example, I work with an artist in Berlin whose ink drawing consists of saving saucers with drips of tea or coffee on them and letting the spills coalesce into beautifully abstract golden blobs. Color is everywhere, and inky effects appear in the most surprising of places. Crushing some berries onto a plate and dipping a brush into the raw juice might be the most vibrant artwork you make all year.
Mostly this is common sense. Dress for a few kinds of weather, and you won’t be forced to return home if the weather changes. Consider your footwear, and you will feel free to really explore. Educate yourself on poison ivy and any other noxious plants, and you can fearlessly collect anything that piques your interest. Don’t try to eat plants you don’t know. Bring along gardening gloves. Watch out for glass, needles, and rusty nails. Approach the unknown with caution and curiosity. Don’t harvest flowers from your neighbor’s garden unless it’s really late at night and you are drunk and in love.
I once spent a day searching an ancient oak savanna for oak galls (those little nubs that produce tannin, which when combined with iron makes ancient oak gall ink). It was a beautiful day in High Park, with foresty smells of last year’s leaves and acorns on the ground. I lay down and looked straight up at huge old trunks reaching fifty feet up; I felt like I was looking down instead of up, watching their branches feather out into space like roots against a brilliant blue sky. I returned home a bit depressed to have wasted a whole morning without a single surprising find. Later that afternoon I was walking my dog in the drizzling rain through the scrappy yard of the police station right across from our house when something caught my eye: a few new oak trees braced with rebar had been planted to replace last year’s under-watered saplings. A bright green bulge was visible, where the scalloped edge of the oak leaf met the stem—an odd little globe of brighter green. An oak gall! It was an unforgettable lesson in just keeping my eyes open.
You don’t need a huge national park to find natural color. Inkmaking supplies can be found anywhere plants grow. If you expand your palette to include industrial materials and ingredients from your own kitchen and grocery store, the possibilities become endless. For workshops I often lead a group along Toronto’s railpath—a kind of industrial back alley reclaimed as a walking and biking path, following alongside a railway line that cuts a diagonal across the city toward the airport. Here detritus from condo developments meet native weeds, invasive shrubs, and wild grasses. I like to give each participant one square meter of random green space and have them look over their little patch carefully. The more you look, the more you see in what first appears as undifferentiated greenery. Dandelion and red clover compete with plantain, bur-dock, and vetch; below that, mosses and tiny sprouts that are hard to identify; below that, creeping vines of morning glory, seed husks from last year, black dirt, and the shell of a firecracker burnt out from some teenager’s celebration. Just at the edge of the patch a few horsetail ferns are emerging, carrying with them the metals absorbed from the soil and the still-dormant but usable vines of wild grapes.
My six-year-old daughter has learned to spot a bright purple blight, which tends to attack lamb’s-quarter, a common sidewalk weed. What is this blight? We don’t know, but we do know that when the afflicted leaves are crushed with vinegar, a brilliant magenta stains the water. If some part of a plant looks interesting to you, throw it in your sack. Bark provides tannins, the inner bark layer contains pigments, sap can act as a binder; leaves and new branches, buds, flowers, fruits, berries, lichen growing on an old log, roots, stems, nuts, and the hulls of nuts—these all carry intense colors. Pigmentation plays all kinds of different roles depending on type of plant, time of year, and even soil type. Pigments can act as a natural pesticide, a lure for pollinating insects, or a last gasp of color before dying (the evolutionary purpose of fall leaves’ colors is still a mystery to scientists). Pigment is also key to photosynthesis (the green pigment chlorophyll attracts just the right wavelength of light to make energy) and can signal edibility or poison.
I do two kinds of foraging. The first is picking a landscape and exploring it without preconceptions. In this version, I fill up my sack with all kinds of different materials, taking note of where I find particularly promising specimens. I also take note (and samples) of the rocks, minerals, and human-made discoveries along my route. Wandering is research. The landscape can be as small as a patch of your own garden and as large as a field surrounding an abandoned reservoir, or the forest of a city park. Pay attention to the hardy weeds that grow in cracks, the vines that climb chain-link fences, and even the litter at your feet. Collecting is addictive. I also love the moment of returning home, when I spread out my finds across a table and sort and label all the possible avenues for future trips.
The second kind of foraging is more focused: the single-ingredient search. I like to pick one plant and try to find out everything I can about its traditional uses, habitat, and growing cycle. Very often the research starts with the plant’s historical uses as a dye. If I know how its leaves were used in the past to color wool, I have an inkling of how I might make an ink out of it. Once I have chosen a plant to target and determined its natural habitat (for example: the buckthorn grows most plentifully at the brackish end of the park pond), it’s mostly about watching and waiting until the plant is at its fullest and ripest. For some plants, the window for maximum color may be just one or two days. I then harvest as much as I can (so that I can try out a few different recipes with it), often calling on the help of children and friends. Berries can be juiced right away or frozen for later use. Nuts like black walnuts and acorns can be harvested and lose no color in being left to dry. Tougher plant matter like leaves, bark, or branches sometimes need to be fermented or left to soak in the backyard to break down and intensify.
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A FORAGER’S CHECKLIST
• warm layered clothing and rain gear, where necessary
• weatherproof footwear
• a backpack or collecting bag
• zip-top plastic bags to separate finds
• permanent marker
• notebook and pen
• pruning saw
• pruning shears
• gardening trowel
• plant- or tree-finder reference book
• gardening gloves
Spring, with its special youthful quality, is an obvious time to forage; the year’s first plants are verdant with chlorophyll, as each one emerges to compete for light and space. In later spring, as growth becomes more complex, you start to see how greenery works in layers and textures. The heat of summer multiplies the number of plants and flowers that can be collected; your eye is drawn to all the colorful possibilities. In fall, it is the spectacular changing of leaves and the ripening of berries and nuts that hold special significance to the color forager.
By winter, however, color seems to drain from the landscape. “Why forage in winter at all?” you may wonder. It turns out winter offers several unique advantages for the color forager. One is that the gray and white landscape of deep winter provides a dramatic and useful contrast for searching. You can see color where it appears from miles away. The wild rose hips, the last of the sumac fruits, or the fiery reds and oranges of the dogwood can all be collected. With less color overall to draw your attention, you’ll also begin to notice textures and shapes that might prove useful to you. The bark of trees, galls of oaks, shells of nuts, and the curling vines of wild grapes all stand out in a muted landscape. If you know how to distinguish the skeletons of dormant plants, winter is a good time to see where plants will pop up in the spring. But most of all, without the greenery, winter is a time to forage for more industrial colors—especially materials that may be covered in weeds the rest of the year. In a city, this can mean bits of rust from iron or other useful metals like tin, copper, or aluminum. It can also mean bricks, masonry, flakes of white gypsum from drywall, spent firecrackers, and other waste that, while seemingly colorless, may provide a catalyst for a vibrant ink.
Still, winter foraging can be hard on the fingers and is never quite as productive as the rest of year. With less time spent outside, I find myself spending more time in the kitchen and studio, working with materials I’ve collected during the warmer months. This is the other secret advantage of inkmaking in winter, when the greatest discoveries often happen not at the level of root, leaf, and twig, but rather in glass beakers and old pots. Interactions between different inks, the rusting and oxidation of metals, the crystallization of salts and natural materials, and the fermentation of elixirs made the previous year—all thrive as the nights grow longer. Winter for me is a season of pure alchemy.
