As late summer eases into early fall and many a flower garden is nodding off, Lisa Rogers’ little landscape is still rocking. The front yard of her home in a single-lane subdivision in Sebastopol looks like the final curtain call of the gardening season with the cast of crowd pleasers, from marigolds and sunflowers to goldenrod and black-eyed Susans, packed leaf-to-petal for a resounding final bow. For Rogers, this spectacle offers more than curb appeal. Her 3,000-square-foot city lot is a micro farm, and this is peak harvest when she gathers fresh leaves and flowers to dry, press, or process into natural dyes and botanical prints.
In late 2020, after years of experimentation and perfecting the art of botanical dyeing and printing — creating images on fabrics using flowers and leaves — she launched SlowDigz Eco Designs to market her handcrafted clothing and household textiles and teach the process to others. “I’m obsessed with trees and nature. I got arrested for trees,” she confesses of the time she took a break from biology studies at UC Santa Cruz to join logging protests on the North Coast in the 1990s. “I have a lot of passion for conservation and being outside.”
Now her conservation work is centered around saving seeds and preserving her garden for her one-of-a-kind, farm-to-fabric scarves, bandanas, tea towels, eye pillows, clothing, socks and more. At a time when AI-generated textiles and designs are showing up in stores, Rogers is patiently producing slow fashion from her garden and garage.
Ecoprinting involves steaming or boiling bundles of plant materials to transfer their colors and patterns onto natural fabrics like linen and wool. What emerges is rarely predictable and leads to inimitable colors and images that may be shockingly bold or softly ethereal and impressionistic.
“It came out such a beautiful shade of red!” Rogers gasps as she opens a Ball jar to pull out a test swatch of silken linen that has been marinating in a solution mixed with the roots of dyer’s madder (Rubia tinctorum), an herbaceous perennial. Rogers grows hers in a raised bed because it can quickly become invasive. She thrills to this magical element of the process. “I find so much joy teaching others botanical printing,” she says. “I love seeing their faces light up when they unwrap a bundle.”
To serve her craftmaking, Rogers maximized space to grow an extraordinary array of plants. While the main garden takes over the front yard, more plants flourish in pots along the side yard and in the back where her husband, Nieko, a builder who supervises residential construction projects, managed to carve out a covered corner oasis for chilling out.
Most of Rogers’ plants are functional, either to feed her unique floral art business or her family; tomatoes, potatoes and herbs are strategically tucked in among the flowers. Amid the striking coreopsis and cosmos that are key ingredients for her dyes and printing, are tropicals such as a bird of paradise and a banana tree that has yet to fruit, nostalgic reminders of Nieko’s native Hawaii and their time living on the north end of Oahu. She uses taro leaves for printing and loves experimenting with new plants like hardy hibiscus and passion fruit.
“I’m always trying to find new plants that will fit in my tiny garden,” she says, chuckling at the absurdity of squeezing in anything more, which she always manages to do. Clever with space, she carved a compact studio into the end of her single car garage. Here she stores materials and prepares the fabric, first by scouring to remove any impurities, waxes and oils. Then she soaks them overnight in a big pot of boiling water mixed with a mordant, such as alum, which allows the fabric to bond with dye.
For printing, she arranges flowers or leaves onto the prepared fabric and rolls it up on a dowel, often with a parchment barrier to prevent “ghost images.” After that she steams or simmers them in a dye bath. She also practices and teaches tataki zome, an easier form of ecoprinting, by pounding flowers onto paper or fabric.
She discovered ecoprinting 15 years ago at a workshop at San Francisco’s Exploratorium taught by India Flint, a self-described “botanical alchemist” from Australia who is credited with creating the artform.
“She showed us how to ecoprint with leaves and I had goosebumps and was really blown away,” Rogers says. “I had no idea she was the mother of ecoprinting, but I knew I wanted more of this in my life someday.”
The opportunity arose during the Covid pandemic when she explored natural dyes more deeply through online classes. “I began making indigo vats and started growing a small dye garden and attempting flower printing. I’ve had several fails over the years,” she says, “but kept planting and experimenting.”
Rogers moved here in 2019 after many years in Lake County, where she taught middle school science and later oversaw school garden programs, fulfilling her desire to be outdoors. She and Nieko looked high and low in Sonoma County for an affordable rural property suitable for gardening but couldn’t find anything within their budget, so they settled on a smaller place close to town and set about making the most of the space they have.
Using the lasagna method, the couple laid a cardboard carpet in the yard to kill weeds and topped it with layers of compost, leaves, manure and straw to build a rich soil. Their garden at first contained more food crops, but with so much fresh produce readily available in Sonoma County, Rogers found herself devoting more space to plants that lend themselves to printing or dyeing.
Among her favorites are dyer’s chamomile, little pops of sunshine with greenish-blue leaves; ‘Bright Lights’ cosmos, petite annuals with orange petals and rays of yellow shooting from their centers; and ‘Black Knight’ scabiosa, a pincushion flower with dramatic deep burgundy blooms that appear almost black perched on tall, thin stems.
As someone who has always felt bound to nature — her happy place growing up in Sunnyvale was spending birthdays at the beach and summers at her grandparents’ lakeside cottage in New Hampshire — she loves the idea of wearing natural fibers colored by plants. “It’s really neat to walk out into the forest and know I’m wearing leaf prints from that black walnut tree or from that eucalyptus,” she says. “It’s like a living piece.”
When Rogers’ garden reaches its peak in late summer and early fall, she takes advantage of the bounty by holding workshops in the North Bay. Whatever she can’t get out of her own garden she sources from a few local florists and farmers. She scours thrift shops for used clothing and fabrics made of linen, cotton, silk or wool, and sources new materials at places like Dharma Trading Co. in San Rafael, where she also teaches classes.
In addition to her eco arts, Rogers works as a senior park aide at Sonoma Coast State Park, where she gets to hang out in a kiosk near the crashing waves and greet beachgoers from all over. She finds the two jobs are a perfect balance of being in — and working from — the natural world. “I love walking by the ocean, amongst trees and flowers in forests and gardens,” she says. “Connecting others to nature through both of my jobs is where I’m meant to be.”
