Half the colour in a dried bunch is the flower's own. The other half came out of a dye bath. Here is how to tell them apart, stem by stem.
A banksia does not grow purple. It will not come up hot pink, and you will not find one wearing true red in any paddock in the country. If you have seen a banksia in those colours, somebody put them there on purpose, and more often than not that somebody was us. The rest of the colour in our bunches, the mustard and the bronze and the papery cream, belongs to the flower already.
We pack and post every one of these bunches by hand, so we know exactly which heads went through a dye bath and which were left alone. Most sellers will not say. We would rather give you the whole breakdown now than have you work it out months later, when the colour starts to shift. Anna, the florist who writes our breakdowns, takes it from here.
People hear the word dyed and reach straight for fake. It is not fake. Tinting dried stems is a trade older than I am, and it exists because drying pulls the colour out and hands you back brown. The honest question was never whether a stem is dyed. It is whether anyone bothered to tell you.
Anna, florist
Why a stem gets dyed at all
Start with what drying actually does. It draws the water out of the tissue, and as the moisture leaves, the pigment that gave the petal its colour breaks down with it. Left to its own devices, most plant material heads toward brown or tan. Brown is the resting state of almost anything dried. A banksia head is the exception worth knowing about: it dries to creamy yellow, gold, orange or mustard, depending on the species. None of those shades is purple. None is hot pink. So when a bunch needs a colour the dried stem will simply never offer up, the head goes through a dye bath and comes out holding it.
The growers are open about this. The words "professionally dyed" sit right there on the wholesale stems, no euphemism, no small print. The trade has never pretended otherwise. What almost nobody does is take the next step and tell you which heads in your particular bunch had the treatment and which did not.
A banksia head is a canvas. Sometimes the colour on it is the canvas's own. Sometimes it has been painted on. The only thing that matters is knowing which.
Purple and lavender. Hot pink and dusty rose. True red. Every one of them a banksia, because banksia is the stem that drinks a tint evenly and keeps hold of it once it has.
Mustard and gold. The bronze a head turns as it ages on the drying rack. Papery cream and white. Foliage in its own copper. Shades the stem already carried, kept the way they came.
The whole range, stem by stem
| Stem | Dyed or its own |
|---|---|
| Mustard bunch | |
Banksia headscreamy gold to mustard
|
Its own |
Ixodia and papery whitesdried pale, not bleached
|
Its own |
| Pink bunch | |
Banksia, focalhot pink
|
Dyed |
Banksia, softerdusty rose
|
Dyed |
| Lilac bunch | |
Banksia, deeppurple
|
Dyed |
Banksia, softlavender
|
Dyed |
Leucadendronmaroon, see note
|
Its own |
| Red bunch | |
Red banksia, focalred
|
Dyed |
Acorn banksiaBanksia prionotes, mustard-orange
|
Its own |
Burdett's banksiaBanksia burdettii, bronze
|
Its own |
The lighter stems, the creams and papery fillers, shift a touch with the season and dry to their own pale tones. None are tinted. The leucadendron earns a second note: its maroon is the plant ageing as it dries rather than a bath, but the plant itself is South African by origin, grown here in Australia. Aussie-grown rather than Aussie-native, and we would rather say so than let it slide past.
You can usually spot it with your own eyes. A tinted head takes the colour evenly, edge to edge, with no bleed down the stem and no pale gaps where the bracts bunch up thick. Where a dye went on unevenly you get lighter streaks in the dense spots. And the real giveaway sits underneath all of it: a dyed stem is nearly always wearing a colour the plant does not make. No banksia comes up purple in a paddock. If the colour looks like it could never have grown, it never did.
The red bunch is where the stance gets tested. Three banksia heads share it. One is dyed red. The other two were never touched: an acorn banksia (Banksia prionotes) in its natural mustard-orange, and a Burdett's (Banksia burdettii) gone bronze on the drying rack. Tinted and untouched, the same bunch, a hand-span apart. Hold them next to each other and you can see precisely what we changed and what we left alone.
Which brings up the one thing the red bunch does that the other three do not. It fades first.
Why red fades before the rest
Red waits at the front of the queue for two reasons stacked on top of each other. The first is the nature of the colour. Bright red and hot pink are the least lightfast shades there are, whether they arrived from a dye or from the plant itself. Light is energy. The molecule carrying the colour absorbs it, and across the months the bond holding that colour together begins to come apart. Reds surrender that bond soonest.
The second reason sits beneath the first. Our red is laid over a banksia that was pale to start with, so as the colour lifts off, the paleness underneath starts to show, and the fading reads loud. A dark stem keeps its ageing to itself. A bright colour on a pale base puts it on display.
Kept out of direct sun, the red bunch holds for years. Sat in a north or west-facing window catching a few hours of afternoon light, the treated tone greys off, and you will clock it by around the third month. None of that is the flower failing. It is the same physics that fades a red car bonnet faster than the white one parked beside it.
None of this makes a sale move faster. Telling you the red will soften, that a fair share of the colour in a bunch began life in a dye bath, that is not the line most shops lead with. We tell you because we have been the ones opening the box at the other end. If the colour is going to change, we would want to know walking in, and we would want to know where to stand it so the change comes slow. So it is written down here. What you do with it is yours.
Andrew and Siobhan
