Re: Okay guys, some particulars about growing henna. . .
Posted by Catherien Cartwright Jones on January 08, 2000 at 15:58:31:
In Reply to: Re: Okay guys, some particulars about growing henna. . . posted by Adam on January 08, 2000 at 07:03:25:
The harvesting thing...
Little henna plants are first set out in alluvial soil, like alongside
and above a little river bank. They grow wild along roadside oasis in
Saudi, against sunny walls in Egypt and Sudan, and in rose hedges in
India. They're windbreaks around vinyards in Israel. It grows like
weeds in Singapore front yards. They can get 25 feet tall at most.
When the plant has had it's first flowering, its moved to a permanent
location. Growers need to blast it with pesticides at least once a
year, because it is really prone to buggies. When the plant is about
3 years old, in a commercial plantation, it is cropped by pruning
off the leafy twigs, and cropping continues 3 or 4 times a year for
years and years.
Egypt was commercially growing henna and exporting it from the Roman
era, and the first commercial henna plantations were begun in India
around 1500. (India certainly had henna long before that, it just
wasn't a plantation thing until then) For most of henna history,
people just had a few favorite bushes in their neighborhood that they
went to when they needed henna. In one Sudanese village, there was
enough variation in the henna bushes locally, that if you wanted
reddish henna, you went to one bush, and if you wanted darker brown
henna you went to another.
When you grow it at home, try to approximate the conditions of a nice Middle
Eastern Oasis. Warm. Sunny.
The preparation of fresh henna, traditionally is to smash the leaves
to paste ... adding a little lemon or lime juice to facilitate dye
release. It takes a lot of smashing, and in India, it was recommended
that the oldest woman in a household do the bashing, and her
daughters-in law do the application. Other times, children would be
sent around the neighborhood to collect a few leaves off every henna
bush in a bucket, and bring them home to grind between two flattish
rocks. Most of the pictures of henna application in India before 1800
show henna being used in this way .... a finely smashed leaf paste,
applied with a favorite flat pebble, into a simple allover "dip"
design. (no pattern, except the very simplest).