As Plants & Colour has evolved from Flora’s personal website to become a learning platform for many artists, Founder Flora Arbuthnott’s personal teaching work has moved to her new personal website: www.floraarbuthnott.com where she offers her own guidance on natural colour making techniques.
About
Plants and Colour was founded by Flora Arbuthnott with the vision of making plant-based colour application for textiles and paper more accessible. It serves as a platform for sharing techniques that enable makers and artists to work with locally available plants, transforming them into vibrant, enduring colours for craft, art, and design.
At its heart, Plants and Colour fosters a thriving community dedicated to the art of natural colour-making and fibre crafts. Collaborating with artists and artisans across the world, Plants and Colour brings together a wealth of recipes and processes for harnessing the potential of locally sourced plants—whether cultivated or foraged. By working with both wild and garden-grown species, we uncover the diverse and rich palette that nature offers. This practice is as much about colour as it is about deep observation, learning from the plants that surround us.
Through an online global network of colour makers, fibre artists, dyers, and printmakers, Plants and Colour facilitates the exchange of stories, discoveries, and creative works crafted from handmade inks and paints. It is a space where plant knowledge is fostered into everyday creative practices.
Flora’s journey into this practice is rooted in her background in textile design and illustration, alongside a deep desire to connect with the land through working with plants. She engages in wild harvesting, gathering invasive species and weeds such as buddleia flowers and dock roots, while also cultivating traditional dye plants like madder, woad, and coreopsis. Her work—spanning drawings, paintings, and prints—blends natural dyeing, ink and paint making, and printmaking into one-of-a-kind surface explorations.
To be wild is to know how to look after ourselves, to be in relationship with the plants growing around us intimately. There are no weeds, only medicines, foods, dye plants, and craft materials.
