Whether you’re an art enthusiast or a nature lover (or both), you’ll find something to pique your interest at one of Farm & Field’s workshops, where artist and farmer Jill Duffy fosters creativity and connection in her barn studio. I signed up for one of her workshops last fall—here’s how it went.
Picture this: you’re traversing gardens and woodsy trails, scoping out the terrain for colorful flowers, berries, and leaves on a nice, sunny day. This was the kick-off to my experience at Jill Duffy’s botanical inks workshop, a day-long program where I foraged plants and processed them into usable inks with a group of other art-curious individuals.
At 10 a.m. sharp on a Saturday, we set off from Duffy’s in-barn studio to explore the Farm & Field property. While she is happy to share the farm’s bounty, Duffy encouraged us to practice reciprocal foraging—harvesting from nature in a way that respects and supports the health of the ecosystem. This includes only taking what you need, steering clear of endangered plants, handling invasive species with care to avoid spreading them, and leaving no trace. Our first stop: her flower gardens. Growing in rows were a wealth of pigment-rich flowers, such as orange marigolds, violet scabiosa, and yellow coreopsis.
From there, our walk took us along paths to buckthorn, sumac, and pokeberry—which we would later turn into ink. Duffy’s land provides ample space for these plants to grow, but many are common in our own backyards. “You don’t need a farm to do this,” she told us. “There’s color everywhere.”
Our group gathered around tables to strip the pokeberry stems of their fruit, macerate the buckthorn, and steep the sumac leaves and coreopsis flowers in boiling water. We took a lunch break while the flowers soaked—a hearty stew made almost entirely of food from the farm, plus local cheeses, homemade pesto, and cookies from Duffy’s youngest son, 14, were served en plein air at a communal dining table.
Then, back to the studio we went. The macerated berries and plant “teas” were double-strained and passed around. Each of us was given a tray with the materials to make gum Arabic (the “binder” for the ink), as well as special additives to modify the ink’s color—and this is when the magic started to happen. With the addition of potash, the pale yellow ink derived from the coreopsis flower was pushed to a bold orange. When alum powder was added to the naturally purple buckthorn, it traveled across the color wheel to become green. The final hours were spent like this, creating individual inks from each material and swatching variations on a piece of watercolor paper before bottling the finished product.
I came home that day with five bottles of ink in different colors—from bold pink (pokeberry) to an opaque black (sumac leaves)—that now live in my fridge, which is the best way to preserve them, per Duffy. I also left the farm with everything I would need to continue making my own inks at home—including a thoughtfully put together recipe and instruction packet, and even extra flowers from the garden that I was encouraged to pick for further experimentation.
Perhaps most importantly, the workshop invigorated me with a renewed wonder of the natural world—what color ink would the dandelions in my yard make? What about the mulberry bush at the end of my street? I hope to be able to answer these questions after the spring thaw. If this sounds like fun to you, too, visit the website to sign up for one of Duffy’s upcoming classes.
