Pokeberry: A Natural Dye that Acts as a Lymph Cleanser

By Sara Szal MD | August 17, 2011 |

Pokeberry, which grows around my home as a weed, is a natural lymph cleanser. Synthetic dyes are associated with allergy, asthma, bladder cancer and cause genotoxicity. Some synthetic dyes mimic estrogen in the body.

Poke is a beautiful example of a dye that can create gorgeous color, and actually improve your health. This is a radical concept: clothing that heals rather than harms. Heals you, heals factory workers.

Here is the poke berry growing wildly near my home.

Rebecca Burgess, author of Harvesting Color, taught me how to boil the poke to produce a dye. Note that consuming poke in your digestive tract is poisonous – the photo below is a vat of dye, not a smoothie! We came up with a great idea – let’s dye natural, organic cotton bras in poke so that we can have lymph cleansing right up next to our breasts, where we all need lymph cleansing! Who’s in?

Posted in Blog, Organic self-experiment and tagged

3 Comments

  1. Sharyn Haynes on September 1, 2011 at 6:33 am

    I want to know how to make poke berry dye,the poke weed in my back yard grows where the horse manure pile was. It is a 9 foot tall jungle .



  2. Paula on September 12, 2011 at 7:50 pm

    I also made my self sick from poke. Not the berries. The leaves eaten raw! I called the poison control that night!
    I had always eaten the leaves cooked before (as a natural laxative-that was okay) After drinking milk I could vomit and have diarrhea and then I was okay again. But, I haven’t touched the plant again in 20 years.