A tale of two yellows

From left to right, wolf moss, osage orange, gold thread

I’m (mostly) back! Apologies of the delay, and many gracious thanks to those of you who hung in there over the last week, and have come back for this posting.

Moving from red to yellow dyes, I thought this would be a great time to touch on one of the problems with trying to identify quillwork dyes by sight. By this, I mean looking at a particular color on a quill and extrapolating back to what dye must have produced that color. Tempting though it is (and I do know how tempting, just from first-hand experience) to pronounce that, say, a yellow quill was dyed with goldthread because the tone of the color was, oh, more orange-yellow than a pure yellow, this approach can quickly lead to mistaken assumptions. Hence, the tale of two yellows….

Wolf moss and osage orange are two yellow dyes used to color porcupine quills. Both are pretty spectacular plants to see in nature–but first prize might just have to go to wolf moss. Wolf moss, or Letharia vulpina, is (to my eyes) like bright, bright, BRIGHT yellow spanish moss. A member of the fungus kingdom, wolf moss (or wolf lichen) can be found on the barks of trees in dry, coniferous forests. As a quillwork dye, it is most strongly associated with western Native American communities from the Rockies to the Pacific, Alaska to California. If you’ve noticed that the scientific name looks a little like ‘lethal,’ there might be a reason: the chemical responsible for the bright yellow color, vulpinic acid, is rather toxic. The website Lichens of North America has several great photos of wolf moss, such as the one here:

http://www.lichen.com/bigpix/Lvulpina.html

Osage orange, Maclura pomifera, is a different dye plant altogether. It is, in fact, in the plant kingdom, mulberry family. Though its original habitat was in the central US (i.e., SW Arkansas, Texas, SE Oklahoma), the USDA estimates that osage orange may be found in just about every state of the Union. The tree can range in size from 40-60 feet tall, and earned the name ‘hedge apple’ in part for its use as windbreaks across prairies (I guess the apple part is a nod to its fruit, resembling a shriveled grapefruit). A yellow dye can be extracted from the wood. Unlike the vulpinic acid of wolf moss, the primary colorants in an osage orange dye bath would be morin, osajin, and pomiferin. For a photo of the tree and fruit, check here:

http://lancaster.unl.edu/hort/Articles/2002/HedgeApple.shtml

Now, let’s take a closer look at the photo that starts this posting. Despite the very different chemical nature of the dyes produced from wolf moss and osage orange, the yellow-dyed quills look nearly identical. This means it would be risky business to state with 100% certainty that a yellow quill was dyed by wolf moss, because it may have just as easily been dyed by osage orange. The history of the quillwork to be gained from knowing the precise materials used could be a stake: Suppose you have a piece of yellow quillwork from Fort Simpson, NWT, Canada. It would be a very educated guess to think that the yellow dye used was wolf moss–but what if it was osage orange instead? Osage orange trees aren’t common in Canada outside of Ontario, so if the dye really was from this source instead, just think about the story that quillwork could tell now!

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