In Trout Lake, a small community in southwest Washington, the peaks of nearby volcanoes and canopies of old-growth forests draw the eyes up. But when Julie Beeler sets out into the surrounding woods, her gaze points downward.
Beeler, an artist, describes her home as a “fungal paradise.” Here, mushrooms are her muse. Hundreds of species of fungi grow throughout the Pacific Northwest, feeding upon the consistent rain of the damp forests. Each fall, the prime season for the edible mushrooms that attract foragers and foodies, Beeler ventures into the woods as often as possible—armed with her collecting basket, rain gear, navigation device, and, occasionally, her dog. But Beeler doesn’t set out for food; she’s in search of color.
Beeler has spent the last decade developing foraged mushrooms into dyes and pigments. Drawing upon her background as an interaction designer, she first shared these recipes in 2021 in the form of the Mushroom Color Atlas, which she recently released as a book.
To Beeler, these natural dyes provide a “radical” alternative to the synthetic versions widely used in the fashion industry. Besides offering shades ranging from brilliant blues to earthy oranges to royal purples, Beeler hopes these mushroom-derived dyes refocus people’s attention to the oft-ignored fungi kingdom that lives beneath their feet.
“What is happening there—that’s responsible for powering everything I see,” Beeler says of the natural world. “We seldom think about that.”
Compared to plant- and animal-derived dyes mushrooms have little historical documentation of their use as a dye source. When she was starting to experiment with fungi dyes, Beeler had few sources to reference until her curiosity led to a mushroom color pioneer.
Miriam Rice started using mushrooms for color in the late 1960s and early ’70s after discovering that the sulfur tuft mushrooms that grow in Northern California turned plain wool a bright yellow. She began experimenting with other mushrooms she found, copublishing books on mushroom dyes, pigments, paper, and crayons with her longtime illustrator and collaborator, Dorothy Beebee.
Rice and Beebee’s work inspired much of the mushroom dye activity occurring today, according to Alissa Allen, a naturalist, textile artist, and founder of Mycopigments. But because their findings were restricted to local species, plenty of opportunities for discovery remain.
“Everything that has been published is based on Miriam and Dorothy’s work, so anything outside that is pioneering information,” Allen says.
Beeler began her own experimentation after encountering Rice’s work in 2013. She worked with the mushrooms found in her local forests, like the anise-scented sweetgrass hydnellum and the lobster mushroom, which, according to Beeler, can smell like a latrine. While the original launch of Beeler’s Atlas included only 28 mushrooms, it has grown to contain information on 40 mushrooms.
The color-extraction process is generally consistent across species. After collecting samples from the woods, Beeler brings them to her garage, where she dehydrates the mushrooms and stores them until the quiet winter months, her favorite time of the year to extract color.
When it’s time to dye, she draws up a pot of warm water and steeps the mushrooms into a sort of fungus tea. Into the tea goes natural fabric like wool, linen, or cotton that has been treated with a mordant, a mineral that helps the dye stick to the fabric. If Beeler wants to craft a solid pigment to use in paints, she’ll add a substance to the dye bath to make the color insoluble.
The resulting colors range from the pale taupes of the woolly chanterelles to the vibrant scarlets of the blood red webcaps. The mushrooms get their colors from the unique chemical compounds they store in their bodies: Terphenylquinones give blues, while anthraquinones can donate colors from brown to red to purple. Even a single species can produce vastly different dyes and pigments, depending on the pH, minerals, and water temperature of the dye baths.
Beeler often uses these colors in other artistic pursuits, including a project in which she embroiders and stitches dyed fabric together to represent the natural world. Eventually, though, she’d love to branch out into understanding the science of mushrooms and color, and identifying how the colors fade over time.
“I think working with natural colorants at an artistic level is this kind of break from the world we live in, with all the technology, the synthetics, everything else. But getting that at scale for an industry I think is incredibly radical,” she says.
Synthetic dyes have gripped the fashion industry since the accidental discovery of mauve in the 19th century. Interest in the large-scale use of natural dyes is growing, in part because of dyes’ environmental impacts. The United Nations Environment Programme reports that textile dyeing is the second-largest polluter of water in the world.
“There’s such a huge movement in the fast-fashion world to transform those practices,” Beeler says. “But I don’t think people are really thinking about color and where color comes from in that dialogue.”
Allen, however, has concerns over scaling up too quickly: “What I do worry about is commodifying the mushroom industry,” she says. Fungi (and lichens, especially) can be delicate, and their environments are under threat from deforestation and climate change, and wide-scale commercial interest in using them as dye resources could overtax them.
Perhaps less flashy and recognizable than a panda bear or redwood tree, fungi have not always been a conservation priority or even included in the popular understanding of wildlife. In fact, fungi weren’t even recognized as a separate kingdom from plants until 1969, and Kew Gardens reports that at least 90 percent of the estimated 2.5 million fungi species remain unidentified.
The interest in fungi is growing, though. Recent work from organizations like the Fungi Foundation has sought to elevate fungi’s status as a group of organisms worthy of protection, such as adding “funga” alongside flora and fauna to conservation initiatives. Allen sees new interest every day in her Mushroom and Lichen Dyers United Facebook group, which has blossomed to over 42,000 members. And the International Fungi and Fibre Symposium, started by Rice and Beebee over five decades ago, still lives on biennially. Next year, it will be in the Canary Islands.
Beeler continues to practice with the mushrooms she finds around her town, hoping to add more colors and species to her Atlas. For now, mushroom dyeing remains sequestered to craftspeople. And Beeler sees this small-scale education as a success. Though her Atlas might appeal to those already interested in mushrooms, she hopes it will attract people interested in color and pique their curiosity about the fungi’s habitats.
“We all connect to color,” she says. “For me, color evades language. It’s an experience. And we’re all experiencing it.”
