Dye Plants

Abstract

A vast bibliography exists, until the 18^th cen-tury, on natural dyes obtained from plants, but only one limited number was used in the dyeing of old textiles, due to capacity of resistance to wash and light fading. The culture of plants or its existence in the wild world had an enormous economical importance for many communities spread for the world, and the intense commercial exchanges that had generated. The extraction of dyes was done from different parts of plants or trees. In some plants was used the leaves, others, only the roots, the fruits, trunks or seeds. The dyes could be extracted through complex processes that involved various operations as maceration, distillation, fermentation, decantation, precipitation, filtration, etc. In this scope, some of the plants cultivated in Portugal are presented and in many other European countries and that they had been used on dyeing.

This work intends to contribute to the loss knowledge of the conditions of culture and to the form of how it was maximized the production of dyes.