Happy Lunar New Year everyone :) Celebrations welcoming the Year of the Dragon are still ongoing in Singapore, and every morning we hear at least one lion dance going on somewhere in our neighbourhood, so the festive vibe feels much higher this year which is nice. There is a temple near our studio that had a dragon dance rehearsal too.
We have been visiting Changi coast (the easternmost coast of Singapore) in preparation for an upcoming workshop with a museum around found and foraged colours based on this site.
This site is about a 20 minutes cycle away from the famous Changi Hawker Centre. Few people usually want to walk so far in so this part of the coast is typically quiet. On our first visit, there was only us and a few other fishermen sitting around waiting for their catch. Our second visit we found a crowd gathered, some with serious photography equipment. Initially we thought there was some rare bird sighting, but we realized later that people were there for the military air show that morning which was an interesting surprise.
Our first visit met much higher tides. We encountered at least four different species of mangrove propagules with different shapes and sizes. Mangrove propagules are mangrove tree seedlings that have fallen from the mother tree in search of new land to root. Many mangrove trees grow their seedlings on the mother tree as an adaptation to the harsh saline conditions in which seeds would not survive well.
There were many of these short green propagules from the Bruguiera trees with the calyx(?) still attached…
We found a long one that looked very different from the others that initially got us excited because we thought it was the propagule of the Ceriops tagal, a rare mangrove tree that was used for brown dyes. But it turned out to be more probably a Rhizophora.
We used this straightforward visual guide for mangrove propagule identification that has been credited to Dr. John Yong online.
There was also this bright pink propagule on the beach! It is an ‘albino’ deficient in green chlorophyll, unfortunately an indicator of oil pollution (Veldkornet et al., 2019). Though cool looking, these ones usually won’t live long.
We are frequent visitors to other coastal areas in search of pigments, but this space is where we find the most number and variety of propagules. Unfortunately, the mangrove forests we have today are a tiny percentage of what we used to have and they exist in small, fragmented patches.
Away from the coast we found the twining Cassytha that grows like a parasite on other plants. They also call it the love-vine… I guess if your love feels like the strangling kind. These vines attach onto bigger shrubs and trees and suck nutrients and water from the host over a long period of time. What a name!
We unclinged some of the Cassytha from the Scaevola shrub (not an easy task) and boiled up the slender green to yellowish stems like a tea.
The colour is a deep mustard yellow with a slight whiff of red tea. Somehow we thought it would have a stronger smell maybe because of how close it grows to the sea. Strangely the colour kind of reminds one of the scorching heat that day.
Perhaps in another post we will share about the other found colours and our second visit to the Changi coast. If you are in Singapore, you may also consider joining that March workshop too which should be already open for registration on SAM’s peatix platform.
If you are still here, we also wanted to share some reflections we had for the new year. Firstly, thank you so much for following our newsletter over the past year. We hope at least some of them were interesting and made you want to share with others. We started off with the goal of doing just one letter a month, because we both write this sort of content kind of slowly. We want to explore more with people how colours can be a way to tell stories - educational ones, strange ones, funny ones, and we are still learning how to do that. If you have some ideas/tips do pop a comment below would love to have some exchange in this space. We are also planning more engagements at our home studio and our neighbourhood this year, so we are excited to meet new faces and hopefully share more ideas.
Anyway, thanks for reading to the end. Hope the year brings abundance to you and your loved ones. <3 Huat ah (prosper ahead)!
Till next time,
Liz and Shirin