Feral Hues: A Guide to Painting with Weeds

Informed by ecosocial artist Ellie Irons’ decade-long practice of making watercolor paints from the berries, blossoms, and leaves of the plants who green urban and disturbed habitats, this book is part field guide, part instruction manual, and part ode to strengthening human partnerships with weeds. Alongside paintings, drawings, and a prompt for “vegetal attunement,” readers will find a step-by-step guide to making watercolor paints from foraged plant parts, and a color chart of the various “feral hues” the process produces. The book also includes four limited-edition Risograph printed postcards featuring Irons’ transects. Growing out of a year of fieldwork in the post-industrial riverfront town of current-day Hudson, New York, the book also profiles seven weedy plants Irons encountered there. Ranging from Pokeweed (pocoon/pèkòn/Phytolacca Americana) toJapanese Knotweed (Hǔzhàng/虎杖/Reynoutria japonica) these plants–whether native or migrant–root on “manufactured land” lying in the Ma