Woad

Where to start! Having recently (13th April) completed a blog about Green Alkanet, another dye plant of almost mythical status calls for attention. I refer to Woad, Isatis tinctoria. We have one precious plant, bought for us by our friends Lynda and Damien Moran.

Our woad plant, just coming into flower. 13 April, 2020

Although infrequently seen it was once widely grown as a crop, with small-scale cultivation continuing into the 20th Century, the last recorded crop apparently being in Lincolnshire in 1932. It was grown, of course, as a dye-plant, until indigo became readily available and replaced it. Robin Hood famously wore Lincoln Green clothes, with the colour being derived from woad and Dyer's Mignonette, Reseda luteola, providing the blue and the yellow respectively to create the green. (Dyer's Mignonette is not uncommon in the Daventry area and grows plentifully around Boddington Reservoir.)

 

The Roman name for woad was isatica but another interesting old name was glastrum. Both woad and glastrum are components of English place-names, indicating where the crop was grown, thus we have Odell in Bedfordshire (originally woad-hill) and Woodhill in Wiltshire (originally wad-hill or woad hill). Glastonbury in Somerset was 'the place where woad (glastrum) grows'. It is native to arid regions from the Caucasus across to Eastern Siberia but has been cultivated since ancient times. In Northamptonshire a colony seems to have become established near Oundle during the 1970-1980's but has apparently died out.

For people of my generation we learned at school that pre-Roman Britons used the blue  dye from woad to paint their bodies. The Pictish people too appear to have used various pigments including woad for body painting. In 1984 Givenchy introduced a perfume which they called Ysatis. Their website is rather coy about the word's derivation but I suspect that Isatis tinctoria was involved somewhere!

This 16th century painting of a Pict, now in the British Museum may be famous,

but the artist could have had no idea of the true nature of body paint.

Woad is related to the cabbage, and the petals on the yellow flowers have the familiar cruciform arrangement of the family. 

Woad is certainly not grown for its less-than-impressive flowers.

Our garden, 19 April, 2020

I confess it is not the prettiest of plants, its yellow flowers being only small, but I hope to obtain enough seed later in the year to create a small patch.