SOUTHLAND

- The plants that – surprisingly! – produce usable fibres

I’ve got plenty of it here and do try to make use of it whenever I can; not for making piupiu or kete, but as simple cord and strips for tying up plants the wind likes to toss about or snap off, such as tall tree dahlia and giant Himalayan lily. Harakeke is flexible and tough and can last more than one season before deteriorating, as can the even-tougher leaves of another native, tī kōuka (cabbage tree), whose plaited leaves are strong enough to bear the weight of a split trunk, or a drooping fruiting branch.

Those leaves make great thatch also, so long as there’s never a naked flame nearby, something I learned as I watched the beautifully woven roof – rain protection for our cob oven – blaze then turn to ash in minutes, following an overly-vigorous fire set carelessly, by me.

Other leaf-derived fibres made from plants that are commonly found in our gardens – anything with strappy leaves including astelia, kniphofia and toetoe – can be used as ties and bindings but none have the strength of the flax or cabbage tree leaves.

Fibres can be found in and separated from the stems of many plants grown here, though most gardeners might be unaware of the resource, unless they have a particular interest in making their own nets, bags, twine or clothing, and the main reason for the obscurity of such useful fibres is the difficulty involved in extracting them.

Stinging nettles of the Urtica family are famous for their attention-getting stings, rather than the beautiful fibre that can be produced from them. There are groups of nettle fibre enthusiasts, mostly in the northern hemisphere, where the tradition of using nettle fibre still continues; I’ve had a go myself though I didn’t succeed. Mind you it’s early days yet and I may come up with a twist of nettle string at some stage.

Growing them is easy; the taller, more wickedly sore European variety is much better than our little annual, sheep farm variety and the native onga onga (Urtica ferox) is too ferocious to be in consideration, I imagine.

I read of one woman who wove a shirt from nettles and can’t resist the allure of such an outlandish article of clothing. Shirts, undergarments and I suppose, trousers, are sometimes made from bamboo fibre, so there’s another of the fibre producing plants we can easily grow here, though how they produce a soft fibre from such a rigid cane I just don’t know! There must be a lot of heavy duty machinery involved in the transformation from tough cane to soft-on-the-skin fabric.

I love goldenrod and grow it for its friendly demeanour as much as for its beautiful flowers, but I’ve seen lately that some gardeners convert their goldenrod stems into fibre for weaving into bags or spinning into string. The trick to obtaining the fibre is to leave the long stalks lying on the ground over winter, allowing the weather to rot away the softer materials and expose the tougher fibres, which are then gathered up, scraped and further processed until they’re in a form that means they can be bound together in some form or other. I may try this, at least to some degree, depending upon my level of interest – following through isn’t my strong point.

I’m looking with interest also at the thick hop stems that I have in great supply here in my forest garden, having encouraged them to grow up through some of my taller trees. Hauling them down is the challenge, but there’ll be no shortage of them when I do bring them to earth.

I know there is a tradition of using hop fibre for some purpose or other and it won’t take much research to find out what. Then, I’ll be able to have a go at it myself, especially if I’ve laid enough of it out under the winter sky, to weather.

There will be other plants too, that harbour fibre in their stems. I’ve my eye on the cow parsley that grows so vigorously here, and a couple of other lesser-known biennials that thrive in the understorey of my forest.

The missing plant, and it’s one of the very best for fibre-production, is hemp. I know there are large scale cultivations in various parts of the country and even one planned for Southland, but the home gardener is not yet being encouraged to grow the plant, because of its hard-totell-apart cousin.

For now, fibre fanciers, or at least those who would like to have a go at spinning, twisting, plaiting, weaving, crocheting and otherwise knitting-together that fibre, will have to wait for more enlightened times.

For now, I’ll simply have to practise on the many other sanctioned plants that grow without persecution, in our home gardens.

Most of us are familiar with harakeke, also commonly known as New Zealand flax. It’s a fibre central to Māori culture and life, and grows readily almost everywhere.