#snowgum

[rottingewe]

straggling

[jillraggett]

Plant of the Day

Friday 25 November 2022

The small, spreading, evergreen tree Eucalyptus pauciflora subsp. niphophila (snow gum) has wonderful flaking bark providing year round interest. This tree will tolerate poorly drained sites, but not waterlogged, and a range of soils preferring slightly acidic.

Jill Raggett

[witnesstruesorcery]

FEAST YOUR EYES!

Cohen the Barbarian was angry. Angry that he never died in battle, angry that the world had forgotten him, and angry that his knees were starting to play up in the cold. He was also angry that his faithful mount had been gifted the ability of magical speech. The horse was insisting that they had made a wrong turn back at Slice. He was also angry that the horse was probably right. This was not how it was supposed to end for the barbarian. This was not how the Discworld’s greatest hero imagined it at all. 

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[whateverbringsyouthroughthenight]

A Snowgum tree in Tasmania.

[witnesstruesorcery]

[landlocked-piratessa]

Snowgum trail - could someone smart in plants kindly explain why these trees rock so hard?

[fibrealchemy]

Secondary dyepot with E. pauciflora

So happy was I, with the colour of the socks in my first experiment with E. pauciflora that I decided to give the dyepot another go and topped it up with more Eucalyptus pauciflora leaves.

I'm mindful of my impact when gathering leaves to use as dyestuffs. snowgums are a rare-ish tree in Canberra, especially in natural settings. Therefore I only gather fallen leaves occasionally from wild trees, or harvest sparingly from cultivated trees. There are many different subspecies of E. pauciflora, and this will probably influence the outcome of the dyepot.

For the 2nd dyepot I topped it up with E. pauciflora from cultivated saplings growing at Lennox crossing sculpture park and boiled these leaves in dyepot with added water for 2-3 hours.

The result was pale lemon colour. I tried to dye maybe 5 skeins of wool – I think too much fibre for the available pigment. It produced a buttery lemon on pure merino and brown on merino nylon blend (forgot to take photos of the nylon blend before overdying). Undecided if I will use this light yellow merino skein or overdye it. I've used the nylon blends in my austral indigo experiments.

-

Around this time I discovered that I’ve been inadvertently shrinking my wool in the dyepot from accidentality boiling it – I’m a bit laissez-faire about letting the dyepot heat up unsupervised, and the old tea urn that we use is no good at holding temp below boiling, so can’t be left alone for long periods of time.

[fibrealchemy]

Dying with snow gum, E. pauciflora

-white hand knitted socks – merino nylon blend patonyle sockwool

-E. pauciflora leaves collected from dead and windfall leaves Mount Ainslie July 2021

-mordanted with alum potassium alum sulphate prior to dying, adding 12-20% alum per weight of fibre to water and gently heating to 80*c for 45 minutes.

-covered leaves in water, boiled in dyepot for 2-3 hours. left for one week until I had time to complete the process.

-removed some leaves from dyepot, added fibre, maintained heat below boiling for ~2 hours. Allowed fibre to cool in dyepot overnight.

-smooth shiny gold appearance, very happy with colour and with successful use of dead leaves. Needed a high volume of snowgum leaves to produce this effect.