Backyard Inspiration

Inspired by Sasha Duerr’s story on harvesting natural dyes from backyard plants that appeared in our Fall issue, Pacific Horticulture art director, Scott Rosenkranz, and his daughter Erin ventured outside to experiment with creating another layer of interest for the layout. They crushed, ground, and pressed the golden yellow flowers of this common backyard weed and in the process “manufactured one heck of a mess in the kitchen.” Then they dripped, splattered, and blotted the extracted liquid onto “countless” sheets of paper until they were pleased with the results. The final result was a beautiful and completely relevant background for the story’s sidebar. “And it was a whole lot of fun.”

Now we’re all inspired! Follow us on Twitter @Pachort to see what we’ve come up with.  And feel free to share photos of your own playful, and very local color experiments with us there tagging your post #seasonalpalette.  Here are the fruits of my recent backyard dye experiments. I’m all set for ribbons for holiday gifting and looking at everything in the garden from a new perspective.