Woad

Overview

Woad is grown in the fields of the Confluence Basins for the blue its leaves give. In the Basins rank shows in colour, and blue is one of the colours a lord's household and a well-off townsman wear; most of it begins in a woad village, which can be smelt from the road before it is seen.

Appearance

In its first year woad is a rosette of long, smooth, blue-green leaves shaped like spearheads, knee-high and lush. In its second it sends up a branching stem as tall as a man, covered in late spring with masses of tiny four-petalled yellow flowers, and then hangs with flat, dark, teardrop-shaped seed pods that rattle in the wind. The fresh leaves smell of cabbage; the vats in which they are worked smell of rot and stale urine, strongly and for weeks.

Habitat and Range

It wants deep, rich, well-drained soil and full sun, and it is grown in field strips on the rises above the flood line in the middle valleys, by villages that have made it their trade. It exhausts the ground, and a field is rested or put back to grain after a few years.

Life Cycle

Woad is sown in spring and cropped in its first summer and autumn, the leaves cut several times as they regrow. Plants left for seed flower in their second spring and die after seeding.

Uses and Dangers

The leaves are crushed in a mill, worked into balls, and dried; the balls are later broken, wetted, and left to ferment for weeks in vats, and the dye comes from that. Cloth dipped in the vat comes out yellow-green and turns blue in the air before the dyer's eyes. The work is long and foul, and woad villages are known for blue hands and a smell they no longer notice. It harms nothing, though the fermenting vats foul the stream below if they are emptied into it, which is the cause of many quarrels with the next village down. The leaves are also laid on wounds.

Lore and Belief

Basin folk say a woad-dyer's household cannot keep a secret, because everyone can smell where they have been, and that a woad village marries within itself because nobody else will. A bride's blue ribbon is a common gift, and the Festival of the First Sheaf sees the lord's household in blue. Dyers say the vat must not be told it is being watched, and turn their backs when the cloth comes out; the blue comes regardless.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Plants and Fungi