What do herb Robert and St John’s wort have in common?

Well, they both have a boys name as part of their common names.

They are both wonderful eco-print plants.

They both show up in several of my eco-printing ebooks.

But the main thing they have in common?

I mix up their names all the time 😳🤦‍♀️

It’s honestly ridiculous. They aren’t related, they don’t look similar. I think it is simply because they both contain boys names that my brain has categorised them together.

I’ve been mixing up their names for years, but I thought I’d gotten over it … until I was editing a video for my upcoming eco-printing on paper ecourse. While watching it back, I realised that I had said St John’s wort every.single.time. that I was meant to say herb Robert 😫 Time for some fiddly editing!

Let’s take a closer look at these plants, and some of their possible results.

Herb Robert

Herb Robert (Geranium robertianum) is a small ground cover with delicate leaves and the distinctive ‘cranes bill’ shaped seed heads that give the Geranium genus its common name of Cranesbill.

I eco-print with herb Robert on both paper and cotton. It’s best to prepare the fabric or paper with iron mordant, rather than soaking the plant in iron mordant as it sticks to itself and is hard to lay flat when wet. The seed heads also print as you can see in this result on cotton:

St John’s wort

St John’s wort is a tall flowering plant with bright yellow flowers. It can be identified by crushing the flower buds, which will release a beautiful deep plum liquid. This colour comes from hypericin, which gives an indication of the plant’s dyeing potential and is also one of its medicinal constituents. You can also identify it by holding the leaves up to light and checking for translucent dots – the perforations that give this plant it’s species name, Hypericum perforatum.

I’ve used St John’s wort to eco-print on both paper and cotton, and occasionally wool. For cotton, I like to soak it in iron mordant then place it on fabric prepared with soy milk binder. For paper, you can use it plain or soaked in iron mordant. If you use it plain and eco-print onto good quality watercolour paper, ideally Arches or Saunders Waterford, you can get fabulous bright prints such as these:

Notice the blue prints from the flowers! Also notice that even the colours of the results from each plant aren’t similar. They are just very different plants to each other. But I’m still trying to convince my brain of that…

How about you?

Have you used these plants? What do you like to do with them? Or do you also have random unrelated plants that you manage to mix up?