The cotton boll sits fat and fluffy, like a miniature sheep tucked among curling brittle leaves, ready to be shorn. This one is still on its stem, sitting in a cup with several others, a bouquet of billowy brown flowers, whisper soft on the fingertips, like cotton candy made with maple syrup, like yarn waiting to be spun. The variety is Nankeen Brown, named for Nanjing, China, where the brown-lint cotton was grown and processed into fabric in the 18th and early 19th centuries, setting off a brief craze in Europe. The cotton sank out of commercial interest once synthetic dyes could routinely produce the khaki color of the finished product. It’s not just simpler to use white cotton; colored cottons have a variety of specialized handling requirements for best results, and commercial white cotton varieties generally have a longer staple (fiber length), making them easier to spin and more resistant to abrasion during spinning, weaving, and wear—an attractive quality as textile production shifted to powered machinery, which was tough on the finer yarns seen in historical textiles.
Brown is not the only colored-lint cotton, although others saw large-scale production even more rarely. Green-lint cotton, another short-staple variety, was briefly pressed into service for uniforms during World War II to get around a shortage of dyes. But in South America, green, brown, and pink (usually a pale blush color) cottons have been grown traditionally for thousands of years, used for embellishments on clothing, along with a variety that is a subtle off-white. Modernly, these native varieties are grown with encouragement from the Native Cotton Project, established in the 1990s to support heritage textile work (and offer an alternative to coca cultivation). Cottons cross-pollinate easily, so growing different colors is a logistical challenge. (If I won the lottery, I’d build a set of greenhouses and grow at least 3 varieties, maybe more.) And sometimes the color is regarded as a fault. “Oh, Maud, we have a problem, because the beige cotton, the light brown cotton, this year didn’t really grow beige,” growers sadly told Maud Lerayer one year. Her home goods company in Brooklyn, Behind the Hill, partners with indigenous growers in Guatemala (and a group in India). The cotton was pink. She reserved the whole crop.
I grow only a few plants a year. I love their richness and their call to a time when more of us lived closer to the sources of our material culture, and did not just roll with such surprises or buy our way out of them but tended and explored them.
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Southern Exposure Seed Exchange sells many heritage seeds, including cottons. In addition to Nankeen brown, they offer 2 green varieties and another brown called Sea Island (Gossypium barbadense) that combines brown color with the longer staple of commercial white cotton.
James Vreeland, who identified surviving naturally colored cottons in the course of work in South America in the 1970s, went on to champion the Native Cotton Project. In 1999, he published an article charting this work, The Revival of Colored Cotton, which has delicious photos.