Journal

Botanical Dye Plants: Gorse

Last year, walking along the banks of Loch Aline in the West of Scotland with the Australian eco-print artist India Flint, we passed some gorse bushes — bright with their lipped yellow flowers, buzzing with bees.

To me, they’ve always been a symbol of Scotland’s rural crofting traditions. Gorse was once woven into daily life: used to pin clothes to dry, for dyeing wool, for kindling quick, hot fires to bake bannocks. Its alkaline ash mixed with fat made soap. But for India, the same plant conjured a very different story — a noxious pest overrunning swathes of Australia, all prickles and peril, a fire hazard, and officially listed as a notifiable weed in many states.

Both truths hold. Many of the people who emigrated to Australia came from crofts like these — now vanished, marked only by scattered stones and a clutch of gorse. Carrying cuttings with them across the seas would have been a way to bring something useful — and familiar — into the unknown. The scent of coconut that drifts from its blooms in spring and summer must have stirred memories of hillsides at home.

As the plant’s usefulness faded — whirligigs and pegs gave way to tumble dryers, electric ovens replaced open fires, and synthetic dyes took hold — the gorse grew unchecked. In Scotland, it swallowed pastures; in Australia, it threatened lives.

Yet it remains one of Scotland’s traditional dye plants. Gorse flowers — and occasionally the young leaves — simmered gently, yield a clear, soft yellow. But it takes abundance: three or four times the weight of your dry fibres in flowers, painstakingly picked between those wicked spines.

Though gorse flowers here and there all year — “kissing is out of fashion when gorse is out of flower,” as the old phrase goes — it’s in late April and May that the blossoms cluster at the branch tips, easy enough to pluck without drawing blood.

For the clearest dye, use only the flowers. The prickles and leaves will bring brown into the mix.

Simmer the flowers gently until their golden vibrancy leaches into the water — usually 20 to 30 minutes — and they shift to a dull beige. 

Let the liquid cool slowly, then strain. On wool and silk, the resulting yellow leans cool, not the warm buttercup of the living bloom.

The colour that you get on wool/silk is a cool yellow rather than the warm yellow of the flowers. 

It is the ‘lemon yellow’ of baby clothes - you can see how a thread of two in a tweed would lighten up the whole, adding spark.

I dye a very limited number of skeins of thread with gorse each April - collecting a paper bag of the flowers on local farmland each April.

Gorse is the symbol of the hearth and home, gorse dyed thread carries this into your creations. 

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