Gold from Newton's Apple Tree

An exquisitely illustrated collection of historical guides to creating pigments from flowers and plants

Flowering currant, ivy, Portuguese laurel, and woad might all have grown in a medieval garden, but it would have taken special expertise to extract and create rich blue and purple pigments from them. Humans have been extracting dyes and inks from natural materials for millennia, and the practice was firmly established during the medieval era, recorded in manuscripts that survive today. Gold from Newton’s Apple Tree brings together recipes for making natural colors according to season, method, and ingredients.

This unique book takes its title from an ink recipe derived from a descendant of Sir Isaac Newton’s apple tree, in which ingredients extracted from the bark are transformed, seemingly by magic, from brown to a yellow gold. But gold pigments can also be extracted from cornflower, crocus, greater celandine, myrrh, and turmeric. Nabil Ali shares his own accessible adaptations for preparing these and other recipes rooted in medieval craft traditions. Along the way, he provides an engaging and informative natural history of the plants used, alongside the broad spectrum of marvelous colors they produce.

Presenting original translations of medieval recipes taken from painters’ and illuminators’ technical manuscripts from the third century BCE through to the twenty-first century, alongside stunning botanical illustrations, Gold from Newton’s Apple Tree is a captivating celebration of colors derived from nature.

Author Biography

Nabil Ali is a visual research artist and visiting tutor at the University of Cambridge, who regularly consults with conservation scientists on organic dyes and paint. He has taught popular workshops at the Cambridge University Botanic Garden, the Ferens Art Gallery, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, the University of Oxford, and elsewhere.