Curing: Salt, Textile, Text

The last nuns left here 18 months ago. Those who didn’t leave lie buried beneath the crypt in the centre of the garden, its creamy walls bright in the summer sun, belying the cool, calm interior. The scent of lemon balm travels on the warm breeze, reminding us of what this place was and who inhabited it. Lemon balm, or Melissa (Zitronenmelisse in German) has a long, intertwined history with the Carmelite order of nuns who used it in their Carmelite water, the secretively distilled elixir, a combination of plants, spices and alcohol which has Melissa at its distinctive and complex heart. 

We don’t know whether the nuns here distilled Carmelite water but Resi, the gardener tells us that they did make oil from Johanniskraut or St. John’s wort, which they sold to the public. St. John’s wort’s yellow flowers, with their five distinctive sunny petals, turn your fingers a delicate purple when you pick them and infused in carrier oil, impart a deep red. The oil is used to alleviate symptoms of depression, as is the soft amber tea brewed from the flowers and leaves. We have been mixing in a syrup made from the lemon balm, a beautiful gentle combination that has a mere whisper of something aniseedy. I have to be careful not to drink too much, still on antidepressants after a tumultuous few years and conscious of the potential for the two to cause adverse reactions (of exactly what, the internet leaves you to ponder yourself). But as we pick and dye and cook and brew here under the watchful gaze of a god I don’t believe in and a sun that I do, I feel an increased equilibrium and wonder if I should start to forgo prescriptions in favour a something softer.

My brain calms as I cook, picking berries and leaves from the garden, while Catherine makes preparations, sometimes using the same plants, in the greenhouse in the corner of the garden, both of us getting to know this place through the things we are making. I steal a few squares of the white cotton Catherine has brought in preparation for the clootie tree we have planned for a workshop (on which more later) and begin experimenting with recipes for steamed dumplings, starting with the idea of the Scottish clootie dumpling, a dark, highly spiced fruit-filled pudding perfect for warming the soul on a wet winter day but less appropriate for a hot, sun-drenched godly Austrian garden. Instead I make a light cake batter and spoon it onto butter-spread blackcurrant leaves, ready to be wrapped in a clootie and steamed. I mean to stud it with blackcurrants but have to fight the birds for them and end up with a mix of black and red, learning a little more about the ecosystems of this place along the way. As I cook, another artist talks to me about the idea of sommerfrische and what it means to different people in this tourist-heavy region on the beautiful lake. When it emerges from its pan and its wrapping of cotton and leaves, releasing in clouds of steam the aromas of vanilla, currants and butter, it occurs that this pudding is like a clootie dumpling revelling in a luxurious sommerfrische setting. 

We cut it into squares to share with Resi in the garden, with little cups of blackcurrant tea. It has become clear that the transition of this place, from one thing to another is not wholly easy or straightforward for Resi. We have no common language and have been concerned about taking up space in this garden which she cares for so beautifully and is clearly so sacred to her. When we sit down with her, offering the fruits of our labour in the shape of the dumplings and tea, and the array of colours that the garden’s plants are beginning to yield, it becomes clear that she is happy to have us here. She tells us, with the help of Gerald and Kaya’s translations, about the power of the St. John’s wort, yarrow and lady’s mantle to help cure various ailments; about how good the walnuts they grow are for cognitive function, especially appropriate because they look like tiny brains. She tells us the reason she always keeps a glass of water on the bleached-out wooden bench in front of the greenhouse is so that she can collect and consume a little of the sun’s energy over the course of the day. This will eventually inspire Catherine to try out a solar dye using coreopsis she has brought from Normandy, the sun helping the flowers produce a richer, darker orange than their pan-dyed counterparts. As we eat and drink with Resi as she tells us her garden secrets, we smile and nod at each other and she clasps her hands to her heart in appreciation of the beautiful coloured scraps that Catherine is starting to assemble. 

The amazing range of colours that come from the St. John’s wort -vivid yellow flowers, amber tea and red oil- continue when you start simmering the flowers to use as a dye. The first batch of French sheep’s wool, mordanted with alum, emerges from the dark bucket a beautiful mossy green. The second batch, this time not mordanted, takes up (and out) the red in the dye, going a beautiful subtle maroon colour and leaving the dye to turn the third, unheated batch a warm peach. After that each subsequent batch is likely to produce more yellow shades. Soon experiments are to start on the yarrow that grows here, which we expect to result in a range of pale yellows whose softness do not reflect the potency of the plant’s physiological effects, used as they long have been, for their abortive properties. The garden is dotted with plants that have historically been used to regulate hormones, soothe cramps, steady moods. We do not have access to the monastery’s archive but can’t help imagining records and recipes, tantalisingly close but just out of reach. We speculate about the nuns’ intimate knowledge of the garden and its healing botanical powers whilst we simmer and soak, making good things to eat and transposing colours from plants to fabrics.

The alchemical processes are most immediate and dramatic when we poke around in the sheds and outbuildings for leftover rusty relics of a productive past, to use for rust-dyeing. We don’t know who used the wood workshop, now dry and dusty, quiet and unused and smelling sweetly musty. We spray fabrics that have been pre-dyed with blackberry leaves with a solution of vinegar (one part) and water (two parts) before laying the metal objects on top. Within minutes the metals have reacted with the tannins left by the blackberry leaves and ghostly outlines of nails and chains emerge almost black against the creamy fabric, ready to be neutralised in solution of water and salt from the famous 3000-year-old mines of the region. We think of rusting as a process of decay but remove the focus on the human use of metal, and chemically it is more of a transformation. It makes me think of this place, the changes it is undergoing and the question of preservation. What should be saved, for whom, and how? What needs to move on, into another form of life, another identity? 

Rust-dyeing fabrics that have not been pre-dyed with blackberry is a slower process. We treat them similarly, spraying with vinegar and then wrap the strips around rusty objects, securing the oddly shaped parcels with garden twine and leaving them in the hot afternoon sun to reveal their reactions overnight, acidic presents to ourselves to be unwrapped tomorrow. Opening them triggers memories of childhood birthdays. Some disappoint and I have to remind myself that there’s no need to maintain a fixed grateful smile. Others are surprising and beautiful, remnants of a past emerging, an abstracted record of the activity that took place here, the details of which we can’t know. After a day of these processes, our hands are orange from the rust, with black around the nails which no amount of cleaning will reverse. The skin of my fingertips, tight and tender from the heat and the salt feels more than ready to be plunged into the cool, soothing depths of the lake which sits just beyond the tall, barbed-wire topped walls of the garden. But walking there from the monastery, sweat prickling on the back of my neck, I secretly like the feeling of the blood gently pulsing in my sore, salty fingers, proof of a day well spent and appropriate in this region whose landscape, economy and culture are all so utterly shaped by salt.

In those ancient mines up in the mountains, with their dark saline depths, scraps of textiles have been found, painstakingly crafted, thousands of unbelievable years ago and since then preserved by the salt. Geologists, archaeologists and other modern scientific minds and equipment have been able to test and analyse them to explore their age and chemical makeup. Through looking at these remnants of another world we now know that they were dyed using woad, one of the three main European plants used for dye processing, which like indigo, is used to create blue hues. The idea of these whispers of precious blue fabric from an ancient past makes me think of sapphires winking in the salty depths. As Catherine points out, they are proof of the continual hold that colour has had over humans for centuries on end. We do not need our clothes to be colourful in order to stay warm; nor does the colour serve any other significant practical purpose. And yet whether driven by questions of aesthetics, spirituality or whatever else, we have craved colour always and have developed complex, time and resource consuming practices in order to possess it.

We were out for a drink on a sweltering evening after running a workshop in the garden. We had been using the array of precious hand-dyed fabrics to make a clootie tree, that ancient Celtic tradition whereby scraps of fabric are tied to a tree, imbued with a wish for something to be healed and as the colour fades and the fabric starts to disintegrate, the problem dissipates with it. The ills our visitors wished to heal were plentiful and wide ranging, from the dermatological to the political, via every kind of physical, emotional and societal problem. The tree was fluttering with multicoloured optimism by the end of the day when the French election results were announced and at least one healing wish was granted immediately. We had been fielding question after question about the plants used for dyeing as the sun cast its ferociously beautiful glow on the colours and the ants congregated in a little cup of lemon balm syrup, set out to sweeten teas made from lady’s mantle, St. John’s wort and blackcurrant leaves. 

The public had come in waves over the day, variously here for our workshop, to come and see the wider project space and many simply curious at finally being allowed access to the formerly sacrosanct, hidden garden with its array of tiny chapels. After the heat and the busy thrum of the day we were glad to be in the welcomingly cool, white subterranean space of our favourite bar here, over the bridge from the monastery and up the hill on Gmunden’s Marktplatz, drinking something chilled, delicious and mysterious, ordered without shared language. Conversation came back round to colour as it often has these last weeks and Catherine started talking about her love of blue as a child, when the coloured pencils were doled out at school and in the scrum, the first to disappear from the pot, seized on by sticky little hands, were always the blue and the pink. She of course went against the grain, competing with the boys in her class to grab a blue pencil. 

Now she sits under the covered area in the sunny garden, making a sack that will sit slightly slumped, filled with soil from this place in the lonely train station where our work will all come together. There is a meditative quiet as she tugs at tiny strips of that rust dyed fabric, pulling them through the weave of the hessian one by one and slowly, steadily, the bloom of rust spreads across the straw colour of the hessian. Once there is enough woad-dyed cotton, flashes and streaks of blue will follow the rusty contours that are building. 

She tells me about the medieval woman whose mummified remains were found beneath a monastery in present day Germany, who had traces of lapis lazuli in her teeth. Nobody knows for sure where they came from- possibly the repeated action of licking an ultramarine saturated brush into a fine point, proof of the existence of highly skilled medieval women scribes. The scientist who made this surprising discovery whilst exploring ancient dental plaque for starch granules was struck by the vividness of the blue, so unexpected under her microscope.  There is something special and other worldly about blue when it appears (so seldomly) in nature. 

When the visitors to the garden flocked around us to tie a wish cloth to the clootie tree, the children were all drawn to the sky-blue shades of the woad. We hand it out to them from where we are sitting, under the shade of the walnut tree, whose leaves and casings have also given us beautiful colour, this time rich browns that speak of nun’s habits which may actually have been dyed using the same materials in the past. As with the Melissa, the Carmelites have a strong connection to the colour brown, reflective of the soil beneath us; the brown scapular, a reduced form of a Carmelite habit, is said to be a symbol of Mary’s protection. 

As the browns and blues, pinks, yellows, greens and oranges build on the tree that is firmly Pagan in tradition, we talk about the need, desire and quest for healing and protective rituals in (and out) of all religions and cultures. We have been working and thinking, blessed with precious time and space to experiment in this place that was so clear in its religious and cultural identity and now faces an uncertain future. I’m not sure what that future should be, though many of our visitors have ideas about it. I think about Resi as I tie one last green scrap on the tree and hope for a tomorrow in which this garden will continue to be cared for as beautifully as she has but also opened up for the world to enjoy.