Wild About Weeds

This story originally aired in the July 14, 2024 episode of Inside Appalachia.

Once in a golden hour
I cast to earth a seed.
Up there came a flower,
The people said, a weed.
— Alfred Tennyson, "The Flower"

On a rainy Sunday morning in Swannanoa, North Carolina, Dede Styles and I are getting ready to run across two lanes of highway traffic, trucks and cars whizzing by at 65 miles an hour. We’re here to harvest sumac berries that grow on the hilly highway median. 

Styles is passionate about what most people would call weeds. She’s a 77-year-old traditional artist who makes natural fabric dyes, and she loves working with the roots, leaves and berries of common roadside plants.

I first met Styles years ago, when volunteering at a local nonprofit. But this is the first time I have been with her to collect dye weeds. 

Eying a break between approaching cars, Styles yells, “Okay, go!” 

We run across the wet asphalt and reach an embankment dotted with bushes and stubby trees. “I might climb on my hands and knees,” Styles says, scrambling up the hill. She leads me to a cluster of sumac trees.

I drive by this spot a lot, sometimes two or more times a day, but I think this is the first time I’ve actually noticed what is growing here. The trees are heavy with cones of dark red sumac berries, which we clip and drop into plastic bags. “These are real pretty ones,” says Styles. “They don’t have any black. Look at that. Hot dog.”

Soon, the traffic starts to pick up, so we slide down the hill, wait for a gap between passing cars and run across the highway to Styles’ truck, parked on the shoulder.

She Started Off Spinning

Making natural dyes wasn’t her first love. When Styles was a little girl, growing up here in the Swannanoa Valley, she used to tag along when her grandmother gave weaving demonstrations. But it was not the weaving that fascinated her. She liked to watch the women at their spinning wheels, turning wool into yarn. 

“I would be watching the lady spin,” says Styles, “And then I’d come home and … I’d try to do that on my spinning wheel.”

Then one day she saw someone demonstrating how to make natural dyes out of plants that grew locally — weeds, basically. And for Styles, that was it. “I said, so what for spinning. This is too much fun. This going out and just getting stuff that people think is weeds, stew it up in the pot, put your yarn in there and make the colors.” 

She’s been doing it ever since. 

Let The Squirrels Have Them

The unmowed yard in front of Styles’ home is filled with drifts of wildflowers, tall grasses and weeds — the perfect spot to grow plant materials for natural dyes. 

Today, she’s invited me over to watch her prep black walnut hulls she picked up under the tree in her yard. 

The walnuts are green and leathery, kind of like hard tennis balls. Styles puts one on a plank, smashes it with a hammer and separates the hull from the nut.

“See, this one has a lot of those little white worms. But they don’t hurt your dye,” she says. “So I just throw ‘em in there.” She drops the hull into a bucket. Then she throws the rest of the walnut over her shoulder into the yard. “Let the squirrels have ‘em,” she says.

Later, Styles will lay the hulls on cardboard to dry out in the sun and then boil them to make a deep reddish-brown dye. 

It doesn’t always come out the way she expects, though. She shows me some dull grayish yarn hanging inside the house. 

“These are experiments,” Styles says, “that aren’t quite working the way we wished they would.”

What color was she going for?

“Purple,” she replies, laughing.

And this just serves as a reminder that natural dyeing is not an exact science, even if you’re an expert like Styles. All sorts of things can change the way your dye colors come out — from the type of pot you use, to where you get your water. A lot of the plants Styles uses for her dyes grow on her land. But sometimes she has to look elsewhere for the plants she needs — like the highway median. 

“If I’m gonna go on some land that doesn’t belong to me to pick dye weeds, I try to get permission from the people that own it,” Styles says.

She tells me about a time she decided to pick some broomsedge, which makes a nice yellow dye. The broomsedge was growing on a vacant lot near Black Mountain.

“The lot was covered,” Styles remembers. “It was a pretty good sized lot and it was covered. I didn’t think he’d miss it.”

But he, the owner, came by and asked her what she was doing. “I explained to him that I was getting these weeds and I was gonna make dye out of them.” 

She says the owner wasn’t upset. In fact, he asked her for advice on how he could grow grass on the lot to hold down the dirt. Styles told him, “You don’t need to do that. Nature has put here on this lot the very best plant to hold this soil. These broomsedge plants have the deepest roots of any plant around.” 

Styles worked out a deal with him to leave the broomsedge alone until she could harvest it in the fall. “I said, ‘Look, if you will not mow it until like November every year, I’ll dye some wool and make you a hat.’” 

And she did.

“I made him a hat that was dyed with the broomsedge on his land,” Styles says. “He thought that was great.”

Styles’ interest in protecting local plants goes far beyond her need for dye weeds. She wants people to recognize the important role that these plants play in the ecosystem so that they will become better caretakers of the earth. And one way she spreads the word is by giving natural dye demonstrations across western North Carolina.

Heritage Day At The Folk Art Center

At Heritage Day at the Folk Art Center off the Blue Ridge Parkway, near Asheville, there are dozens of artists demonstrating traditional Appalachian crafts. In her tent, Styles has about 50 skeins of beautifully colored yarn in yellows, greens, blues and purples spread out on a table and hanging from a line.

Off to the side, a big iron pot sits on a propane burner, and every so often, Styles walks over and stirs the dark liquid inside.  

“The brown that I’m doing today I made with sumac berries,” she says. “Here’s how they looked after I cooked them, see?” 

As Styles describes the plants she uses, a few younger-looking folks drift her way. They are graduate students studying landscape architecture at the University of Tennessee.

Soon they surround Styles, and start to ask questions.

“So, are you worried about, like, anytime in the near future not being able to find what you are looking for?” a student asks. 

“I am,” Styles replies. “I am lucky, because I have a big field in front of my house where I can grow a lot of the stuff. But I am even more worried about the insects. And everybody that eats food should care about pollinators.”

“Absolutely,” says another student. 

“So, as often as you can in your designs, plant things, native things, that can support the pollinators,” Styles says. “We have to change. Now that there’s so many of us, we have to change how we look at the world or we’re doomed.”

And there it is — her not-so-secret mission to save the planet by getting people interested in local plants and weeds. 

But Styles has been the dye lady for a long time. She’s been hauling iron pots and giving outdoor demonstrations for 24 years.

“I’ve been out there in the rain and the snow and the thunderstorms and the lightning and everything,” she says.

And she’s getting a little tired. So Styles tells me she’s taken on an apprentice. She received a Folklife Apprentice grant through the North Carolina Arts Council to mentor a younger artist and teach her all she knows about the craft of natural dyeing.

“I think that the most important thing … not that all the people who see me are going to be dyers,” Styles says. “But what I really hope they take from it is an appreciation of the natural world. That what they thought was a weed can actually do this thing, this beautiful thing. And make them more aware as they move around in their day of what they see on the side of the road.” 

To learn more about making natural dyes from native plants, check out the book Wild Mountain Time: Native Dye Plants by Dede Styles and Frederick Park.

For more information about natural dyeing or to learn about upcoming dye demonstrations, visit the Southern Highland Craft Guild in Asheville, North Carolina.

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This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia.

The Folkways Reporting Project is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts and culture.