Natural Palettes: Inspiration from Plant-Based Color

“The plant-lover’s alternative to the Pantone color guide.”—Julia Sherman, creator of Salad for President
 
Renowned natural dyer, artist, and educator Sasha Duerr envisions a new age of fresh, modern color palettes, drawing from our original source of inspiration and ingredients—the natural world around us.
 
This innovative plant-based color guide includes twenty-five palettes with five hundred natural color swatches, providing a bounty of ideas for sustainable fashion, textiles, fine art, floral design, food, medicine, gardening, interior design, and other creative disciplines. Bring the healing power of forest bathing into your home with a palette of spruce cones, pine needles, and balsam branches. Move past Pantone and embrace the natural balance of a pollinator palette with Hopi sunflower, red poppy, echinacea, and scabiosa.

Duerr complements her palettes with illuminating reflections on connections between color and landscape, the healing properties of medicinal plants, the ways food and floral waste can be regenerated to enhance lifestyle experiences, the ecological benefits of using natural colors, and more. You may never view color—or the plants that surround us—the same way again.

Sasha Duerr is an Oakland, California-based artist, designer, and professor at the California College of the Arts. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Martha Stewart Whole Living, Selvedge, and the Huffington Post. She is the author of Natural Color and The Handbook of Natural Plant Dyes.