A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1054 entries
weld
Weld is a tall, spindly biennial of chalk, waste ground, and old walls with a long narrow spike of small greenish-yellow flowers, and it is the source of the brightest and most lightfast yellow dye available in Europe before synthetics. The whole plant above ground is used. It gives a clear lemon yellow on wool and holds its color for centuries.
Etymology
The word is Middle English and its further origin is not settled. It is also called dyer’s rocket and dyer’s weed, and its Latin species name means, roughly, of the dyers. It belongs with madder and woad in the set of three plants that supplied nearly all the color in European cloth before the trade routes opened.
Notes
Those three between them made everything. Weld over woad gives green, which was otherwise almost impossible to dye directly, and weld over madder gives orange, so a dyer with three plants and a set of mordants could produce a full range. Weld is the oldest of the three in European use, with archaeological evidence going back to the Neolithic, and it is still grown for historical textile work.