In his studio and dye garden in Greensboro, Alabama, Aaron Sanders Head coaxes blues, oranges, and browns out of indigo vats, boiled Osage orange wood, and rainwater-soaked black walnuts, tapping into the long tradition of textile arts in the Black Belt. *Including an easy recipe for dyeing with black walnut hulls.
Story by Caleb Johnson | Photographs by Irina Zhorov
August 03, 2021
Just off U.S. Highway 61 in Newbern, Alabama, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it community in southeastern Hale County, stands perhaps the most astonishing Osage orange tree alive today.
The fruit-bearing tree is known by many names: hedge apple, horse apple, mock orange, monkey brain, and bodark, which is a bastardization of the French bois d’arc, meaning bow wood.
Across rural Southern landscapes, you can still find fence posts cut from the Osage orange tree. Its wood is hard and heavy and doesn’t shrink or swell much in sun and rain. While the Osage orange produces a large, yellow-green, edible fruit that drops to the ground each fall, most people — and few animals, aside from squirrels, which will eat almost anything that doesn’t eat them first — don’t fool with them, making a trait that once enhanced seed dispersal now something of an evolutionary anachronism.
Aaron Sanders Head stands next to an Osage orange tree in Newbern, Alabama (left). He forages and boils the wood of the trees to produce a radiant golden dye. Head says he doesn’t gather this particular tree’s wood, though, because it feels too sacred. Head holds storm-tossed Osage orange wood with indigo-stained hands (right).
It’s late April, and Aaron Sanders Head and I are wrapping up a day spent visiting sites where he forages dyestuff when he mentions this bodark tree. Its fallen branches could be chipped and cooked to produce a dye that turns fabric a radiant gold color, but Aaron won’t forage from it because, he says, this particular tree feels too sacred. He’s adamant I see it, though, so we turn off the highway and park on a gravel road. At a distance, the tree appears overgrown and forgotten. Up close, I realize someone had trained its many branches toward the ground and, in some cases, buried their tips so the canopy retains a shape like the domed lid on a cake stand. Aaron leads me through them to the tree’s twisted trunk. I look up. The branches splay outward, then dive all around us. He was right; the tree does feel sanctified. Or better yet, singular.
The potential for such a remarkable encounter is one reason Aaron and his partner, Tim Higgins, left Nashville for Hale County. The move also provided them an opportunity to shift away from a grind-focused approach to artmaking. In Greensboro, the county seat, Aaron has more space and time to experiment and make mistakes. With less overhead, he doesn’t feel as much pressure to define himself by financial success alone. He compares the life change to breaking a bone, then resetting it. It wasn’t painless, but eventually, healing occurred.
Driving into Hale County feels a bit like traveling back in time, in part because it remains such a deeply rural place. Cattle outnumber the people I see from my car. Chestnut-brown horses graze pastures stretching toward distant treelines. Sometimes a town, like Newbern, resembles little more than a collection of buildings alongside the road.
I meet Aaron and Tim outside their three-story Victorian house on Greensboro’s Main Street, wedged between the First Presbyterian Church and its parsonage. While sipping coffee, they give me a tour of the place, which features tall ceilings, accented plasterwork, pine floors, and a fine collection of antiques and art the couple has gathered over their decade together. Grand homes like this are affordable in Greensboro, even for people, like Aaron and Tim, who make their living entirely from their respective artistic endeavors. Through a window, I see a water tower proclaiming the town of fewer than 2,500 people the “Catfish Capital of Alabama.” On the drive in, I’d passed sprawling fish farms where great egrets — the largest white heron in the east — hunted the shallows for easy, farm-raised prey.
Aaron wasn’t lacking context for the rural South when he and Tim moved here two years ago. He grew up in Grady, Alabama, near Troy, where his grandparents were mail carriers. Before he was old enough to attend school, he would ride along on their rural delivery routes. “I feel like if there’s one profession that kind of sees everything, it’s mail people,” he says. “[Those rides] definitely shifted my perception of rural living.” He learned there was often more than meets the eye when it came to someone or someplace. “People assume that small means conservative or small means isolated, or that isolated means unintelligent,” Aaron says. “We both obviously know that’s not the case.”
We step out back into his dye garden. Six unassuming beds, each one about 12 feet by 4 feet, marked by weathered red bricks. Early in the growing season, the plants are small. None taller than a pint glass. Indigo, marigold, cosmos, scabiosa, coreopsis, and bachelor’s button. Some sprouts Aaron started inside the house, using heat lamps and grow mats, then transplanted outside. Others he grew from seeds placed directly in the rich, dark soil produced by an eroding ancient ocean floor that gives this region its name — the Black Belt.
By mid-June, the garden will be fully producing, Aaron says. The growing season in Hale County can stretch from March to November, depending on the dates of the last and first frosts. Certain plants Aaron grows, like cosmos and bachelor’s button, are self-sowing annuals, meaning they’ll drop seeds and germinate on their own the following year. He chooses each dye plant for reasons beyond its functional use. Marigold, for example, “gets a bad rap as common,” he says, but it controls pests, and the flowers look beautiful when dried and hung on string. Indigo, an Asian dye crop used since ancient times, was a driving currency in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Enslaved people brought knowledge of its cultivation to the South, where the crop was grown at a pace that initially outdid sugar and cotton. Aaron, who is white, acknowledges and discusses indigo’s history with participants in his natural dye workshops in hopes that doing so will compel them to engage with the legacy of white supremacy in the South.
“When you start dyeing with plants, you see your environment a bit differently,” he says. “You see a new layer, a very visceral, visible layer. It sort of shifts your perception and relationship with a place.”
His belief in pushing back against misconceptions of rural places and desire to engage with the region’s racist legacy first attracted me to his work. I was also mystified by the colors he coaxes from flowers, shrubs, and trees growing within a 20-mile radius of his home. They startle the eye with their depth and richness. Then there’s his sewing. The geometric, landscape-inspired patterns Aaron stitches onto upcycled fabric evoke William Christenberry, who spent a lifetime photographing the natural and manmade features of Hale County.
Head explains shibori — a manual Japanese dyeing technique that involves folding and binding a piece of fabric before dipping it into the vat. Simply put, the more complex the folds, the more intricate patterns you get. Head most commonly uses this technique when working with dye made from Japanese indigo (Persicaria tinctoria), which is sometimes called dyer’s knotweed.
After dropping out of art school in Boston, Aaron enrolled at the University of Alabama and studied art history, focusing on the same vernacular architecture Christenberry photographed. Like Aaron’s textiles, no two vernacular structures are exactly alike, though all share characteristics that reveal something about who made them. After graduating, Aaron worked at the Kentuck Art Center & Festival — a renowned institution for folk art — and, having moved to Huntsville, as an administrator at Lowe Mill ARTS & Entertainment, the largest privately owned arts facility in the South. There he booked a natural dye workshop with the artist and fashion designer Nadene Mairesse of Florence, Alabama. The two hit it off as Aaron’s interest in natural dyes evolved, and Mairesse became a mentor, sharing techniques, troubleshooting dye recipes, and helping Aaron find his voice as an artist and a teacher.
“Thinking about artmaking gave me the space to make my own work without the pressure to do it for an institution,” he explains of his past work in arts administration. “What I realized I was doing that whole time was gathering models for creative living.”
Tim, a musician who also grew up in Alabama, provides one model. The couple met in Tuscaloosa at a bonfire party in Tim’s backyard. While living in Nashville, they booked performances and workshops in the same towns and cities so they could travel together. Aaron also frequently mentions his parents. Both worked for Bonnie Plants until recently retiring. His mother, Prissy, quilts and crochets. Aaron observed and admired her handiwork from an early age. The first thing he sewed, he remembers, was a red felt stop sign. He was about 10 years old. Now he sends pictures of quilt blocks to Prissy and asks her opinion. They even have a collaborative quilt they’re working on.
Hand-stitched pieces inspired by the local landscape hang on a wall at Head’s gallery. Head teaches an environmental embroidery class, where he encourages students to walk outside, make sketches, then turn their drawings into needlework.
And, of course, you cannot talk textiles without mentioning the women of Gee’s Bend and their dazzling quilts. Born of necessity, their improvisational style has received worldwide acclaim. Quilts by Martha Jane Pettway, Mary Lee Bendolph, and Lucy T. Pettway hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Aaron acknowledges the artistic debt he owes the women of Gee’s Bend, located about an hour’s drive from Greensboro, as well as others in the Black Belt. He endeavors to give back to a place that gives him so much. The first step is a gallery/studio space he opened downtown last October. Going forward, he aims to launch a multi-campus arts center that will include residency space for artists to do long-term community-based programming.
Blue is a rare color in nature, which is, perhaps, why humans find it so alluring. Some argue the color doesn’t naturally exist because the blues we see are permutations of other colors rather than true blue pigment in, say, a flower’s petals or a bird’s feathers. The blue Aaron gets out of his indigo vats ranges from a bright azure to a deep cobalt to something like a sky crayoned by an excited child. After leaving the garden, he invites me to see where his dyes get made.
We walk five minutes east on Main Street, passing a flea market and a flower shop and a post office. Inside the studio/gallery space, incense burns on a table. Warm sunlight falls through the massive south-facing windows of the former auto parts store onto potted dye plants awaiting a weekend sale. Aaron’s hand-stitched wall hangings are displayed alongside pieces by other Alabama artists, including Doug Baulos, Kimberly Hart, and Amber Quinn. Aaron shows me a series of stitchwork inspired by natural features of the Black Belt — waterways, kudzu patches. Sometimes, he teaches an environmental embroidery class, where students go into nature, make sketches, then turn those into patterns they can stitch.
“My interest has always been in the place more than anything else,” he says, admitting this is a bit of a trope for Southern artists.
He pries open an indigo vat made last fall, gently stirs the dye, then starts explaining shibori — a manual Japanese dyeing technique that involves folding and binding a piece of fabric before dipping it into the vat. Simply put, the more complex the folds, the more intricate patterns you get. Aaron most commonly uses this technique when working with dye made from Japanese indigo (Persicaria tinctoria), which is sometimes called dyer’s knotweed.
Head demonstrates indigo dyeing, which requires multiple dips in a vat to achieve a deep blue. The cloth looks electric green at first, then changes to darker blue when it is exposed to oxygen.
To demonstrate, he takes a scrap of cloth, folds it a few times, places wooden tongue depressors on either side, and holds them in place with rubber bands. He dunks the cloth into the vat and holds it there. While we wait, he riffs on dyeing being similar to other Southern traditions, like shelling beans, that keep the hands busy while freeing up time to talk and tell stories. The transference of communal knowledge can take place over a dye vat.
When Aaron removes the cloth, it takes on a bright green color he describes as “toxic” and calls to mind, for me, the Incredible Hulk. As the cloth is exposed to air, it transforms from bright green to blue. Aaron says it will dry a few shades lighter, then he dunks the cloth again. “It feels almost alchemical,” he says. “It’s sort of part witch, part mad scientist.”
Sharing this experience with others is as important to him as engaging in his own solitary practice. Aaron says he prefers working with textiles because of their approachability. “More so than painting or sculpture, everybody has a relationship with textiles in some way,” he says. “No one really feels ostracized by a quilt, for the most part.”
The fabrics Aaron dyes come from the community — donated, or purchased at yard and estate sales. He shows me an old christening gown he’d dyed below the waist, where little flowers were sewn. Touching them, he muses, “Imagine all the hands that did this tiny [detail] work.”
The story behind a piece of fabric fascinates Aaron, but he also values sustainability. “With textiles being one of the most polluting industries in the world,” he says, “there’s more impetus here than anywhere else to source your textiles sustainably, considering how exploited labor has been here for cotton.” Through teaching, he hopes to convince others to source in more sustainable ways, too. “It’s so second nature to me, but I can forget the transformational aspect of teaching people things,” he says. “You watch people shift in front of you — and it’s amazing. Once I figured that out about teaching, I knew I couldn’t give it up.”
He usually books workshops at community sites rather than in museums or retail spaces, where there’s an impetus to buy something, and maintains a need-based sponsorship fund to provide participants with supplies for a given workshop. “When you’re working with a textile or craft that’s based in Japan or in the hands of African American women in Alabama, if you’re looking out at your participants and it’s just a bunch of white people, then you’re sort of missing the boat a little bit, I think. Textiles should be the frontrunners for inclusion.”
Inclusivity in artmaking isn’t a medium- or geography-specific problem. Kenya Miles, a textile artist and gardener in Baltimore, runs a studio/educational space called Blue Light Junction. After working in television and film in New York City in the early 2000s, she moved to Oaxaca, Mexico, and learned weaving and hand embroidery techniques from Indigenous women. She later moved to the Bay Area and, despite its diverse population, didn’t see the city represented in the textile community. Eventually, she moved to Baltimore to be closer to family and found, she says, a more viable place for artists. Blue Light Junction is located in a gentrifying area of Baltimore. Preparing to host the space’s first in-person workshops, Kenya says she and her collaborators will have to balance finances with reaching populations beyond the immediate neighborhood. “One of the reasons I started teaching was because I wanted community,” she says. “The practice of textiles is really about utility first and foremost, but those things are expressly about community.”
Aaron also sees his practice tied up with community building. In 2019, in collaboration with the Hale County Public Library, he was awarded an arts education grant from the Black Belt Community Foundation (BBCF) to host free natural dye workshops for adults, as well as children in local schools. He held one session before the pandemic forced him to change plans and make take-home dye kits that included fabric, Osage orange wood chips, and instructions for completing the dye process. He used additional funds from the BBCF to make 1,000 fabric masks that were given away at the public library. Gee’s Bend quilters Mary Margaret Pettway and Mary McCarthy also sewed hundreds of protective masks for their community with financial support from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation.
“With any craft, there are a lot of gatekeepers,” Aaron says. “In my teaching, I try to limit that and come to people where they are. I want as many people as possible to be doing this kind of work.”
As COVID-19 restrictions ease, Aaron is preparing to teach in-person summer workshops for the first time inside the gallery/studio space, too. He will meet participants in the garden, discuss the history and function of the plants, harvest some, then walk to the studio and make vats of dye they’ll use to color sustainable fabrics.
“Coming here was never part of a savior point of view, was never to come here and fix Greensboro — because it’s not broken,” he says as he clamps a lid back onto the indigo vat. “We want to use our existing talents to feed into what we saw here as already being a magical community.”
After leaving the studio/gallery space, we sit down for lunch on Aaron and Tim’s L-shaped porch overlooking Main Street. Tim puts the finishing touches on a meal of black-eyed peas, collard greens, pimento cheese, and cornbread. There’s pound cake for dessert. While eating, we talk about making a life as an artist, the compromises it requires, the flailing we did in our 20s as we searched out creative interests. Every so often, a car passes and honks. The couple lazily wave back. Sarah Cole, who runs a pop-up bakery in Aaron’s gallery on weekends, walks by carrying a sourdough starter. She stops to enjoy a slice of cake as well.
Aaron’s connection to Hale County is deepened by foraging, a tradition that goes back to the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, who lived here before white settlers arrived. He becomes animated when discussing this part of the process. “Once you start foraging for dye goods, any ditch is a potential candidate,” he says. A favorite is Queen Anne’s lace — an invasive ancestor of the garden carrot that blooms white and grows along interstates and backroads throughout the United States. “When you go cut Queen Anne’s lace off the side of the road, take it home, boil it, and make this beautiful yellow [dye], it’s sort of a transformative experience,” Aaron says. “You don’t see those Queen Anne’s lace weeds the same way again.”
After lunch, we wander to the end of Main Street and onto the grounds of Magnolia Grove — an estate featuring a Greek Revival mansion surrounded by 15 acres. Aaron points to signage that has recently been updated to acknowledge the enslaved people who lived and worked there, something that is needed at more historical sites in Alabama. Among the magnolia trees that give this state-owned museum its name, Aaron scouts a few Osage orange trees for limbs ready to snap. Whenever a storm rolls through, he drives here first and picks up deadfall. There aren’t any fallen limbs today, but Tim points out one that looks promising. Aaron tugs on it, makes a mental note to return.
At the opposite end of Main Street, we drive to a sprawling private property where Aaron has permission to forage black walnuts. Greensboro, it occurs to me then, contains more beautiful old homes and immense trees than perhaps any town in the state. The honeysuckle is in bloom, privet has dumped pollen into the humid air, skinks sun themselves on porches, and cats saunter through overgrown yards as though they are on guard duty. A smoky gray one meets us here. We walk past a tumbledown structure that could have been a detached kitchen, a sharecropper’s cabin, or even a house for enslaved people. No signs like the ones at Magnolia Grove tell the stories of whoever resided there.
In the side yard Aaron shows me a bucket filled with rainwater, black walnuts he gathered last fall, and a scarf he’d sunk in the makeshift dye vat and forgotten. He reaches into the inky water and retrieves it.
“It’s not glamorous,” he says, squeezing out the fabric, “but how cool that you come here, [the black walnut falls], you put it in a bucket and it gets rained on for a long period of time. You put a scarf in it and come back in a month, and you have this dyed scarf with no intervention at all.”
The scarf is a rich brown color that appears almost golden in the afternoon light. Aaron sinks it back in the bucket, then continues walking. While some artists who work with natural dyes take a more scientific approach, he says, “I try to let my guiding principle be wonder.” Discoveries made during the process mean as much as the finished product. He tracks trials and errors in notebooks he keeps stashed around the house and studio. He can afford this sensibility, too, because he doesn’t need to reproduce identical items to sell.
By the time we return to my car, it’s getting on into the evening and I have to make a two-hour drive back across the Black Belt. Before Aaron lets me go, though, I need to see the bodark tree in Newbern.
As we drive there together, he mentions the challenges of last year. Practically overnight, he lost half of his income when COVID-19 restrictions made it impossible to travel and teach in-person workshops. He and Tim were quite isolated, staying home to protect their health and that of others. He says they didn’t see their families for an entire year.
“I think the only way you come out of that,” he says, “is by digging in really deep, becoming intimately familiar with your environment.”
He acknowledges that this looks different for everyone. Not all artists can or should commit to living in a small town like Greensboro, where Aaron points out there’s no fancy grocery store (even the Piggly Wiggly closed last year) or symphony or even a movie theater. Being here works for him and Tim, though. “It’s a decision you make to live in a place with less of that, so you have more space for other things.”
Head holds up a scarf that has turned a deep brown after soaking in black walnut dye for about a month.
Recipe by Aaron Sanders Head
The rich brown tones that can come from black walnut come from the compound juglone, which is found in the leaves, hulls, roots, and bark of the black walnut tree, but especially in the hulls. There are a plethora of ways to extract color from black walnuts, but I am sharing the most passive technique, my personal favorite.
When green-husked black walnuts fall to the ground in fall, gather them in a bucket or weatherproof container. If you’re diligent about gathering, you can easily fill this up quickly. Fill the container with water, or let the container fill with rain. Cover and let sit until the liquid turns a deep brown, typically one to two weeks.
When ready to dye, choose a natural-fiber item and place it in a nonreactive pot that you won’t be using for food purposes. Add your fiber and cover with dye liquid from your black walnuts. Bring to a low simmer (but not a boil), and heat until the fiber is your desired shade. Let cool in liquid overnight for extra-deep shades. Rinse and hang dry, out of direct sun.
Replenish your black walnut dye with additional black walnuts as they fall, and as yours break down. Add more water or rain as the liquid levels fall. This dye bath can be used in this way for years.
Caleb Johnson is the author of Treeborne and teaches writing at Appalachian State University. For The Bitter Southerner, he’s written about the evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson.
Irina Zhorov is a reporter who works for print and broadcast publications. Some of her interests include mining, energy, the environment, and urban issues. She speaks Spanish and Russian. For The Bitter Southerner, she photographed the evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson.
