For our first investigation we were to make a dye pot with whatever leaves we could find, preferably eucalyptus but anything would do for those who didn’t have easy access to eucalypts. I found a fallen branch near this tree, it was in a park within the 5km radius (lockdown restrictions) to my home.

I spent my birthday this year in stage 4 lockdown thanks to the Covid19 pandemic, to lift my spirits I treated myself to an eco printing course called Eucalyptographia run by India Flint. It is a fascinating course and I was very eager to get going.

One of the hardest things I found from my experiences with eucalyptus is the identification. There are said to be around 900 species of eucalypts that have been identified and they come in all sizes and shapes… one would think with the easy access to information in the 21st century this task would be easy. The problem is, with easy access there is also abundant misinformation. Try search any eucalyptus names you know you will see what I mean. One of the more authoritative sources is EUCLID, a database run by the Centre for Australian National Biodiversity Research. It is arguably the most comprehensive and most up-to-date encyclopaedia of Eucalypts.

Anyway my search on EUCID and other internet searches led me to believe that what I had gathered came from Eucalyptus camaldulensis, or river red gum.

Although the river red gum is definitely an Australian native, it was named after a monastery in Tuscany, central Italy.

Incidentally among the recommended readings from my course was a book called Eucalyptus by Murray Bail, and in this book there was a story about E. Camaldulensis: that some river red gum nuts were inadvertently brought to the gardens of Camaldoli and then dropped, quite by accident, that had then taken roots and grew into big gum trees.

Of course that was fiction. In fact, it was named by a distinguished Italian gardener/landscaper Frederick Denhardt, who propagated some river red gums from the seeds sent to him by Allan Cunningham, a King’s Botanist in New South Wales. Denhardt later named these gums Eucalyptus camaldulensis, after the Camaldolese Hermitage where the gums were planted. Unfortunately these gum trees were cut down in the early 1920s for reasons unknown. A sad loss.

You can see from my samples that it produced some rich colours on protein fibres but less so on cellulose fibres, this could be due to that scouring was only done following the process for protein fibres for simplicity in this exercise. Nonetheless I really like the rich brown tones in the alpaca and merino/silk, the photos don’t do them justice. I was able to completely exhaust the dye pot with the final merino tops.

p.s. be careful when you are around a river red gum, it is known for dropping big boughs, hence the colloquial name “the widow maker” 🙃