Henna

Lawsonia inermis

Henna is a slow-growing, woody perennial with drooping branches, small, glossy leaves, and clusters of fragrant, white flowers.

Henna leaves are best known as a natural dye, which is used in body adornment, hair coloring, and ceremony, but henna has a rich cultural history in many regions and traditions around the world. This post is not meant to be a comprehensive or authoritative guide because this is not our culture. What we’re sharing here is simply our limited, personal experience growing henna in Central Texas, getting to know it as a plant, observing how it behaves in the garden, and experimenting in small ways with what it has to offer.

Growing Henna

Henna loves heat, sun, and well-drained soil. It’s fairly drought tolerant once established, but young plants benefit from consistent watering, letting soil dry slightly between waterings.

In cooler climates, henna is often grown in containers and overwintered indoors. In Central Texas, we grow our henna trees in big pots and overwinter them in the greenhouse. It’s likely that in the right conditions (and protection during snowpocalypse-level winters), a henna tree could survive in the ground over winter and slowly establish into a long-lived perennial. We have more experiments to do before we can speak from personal experience. But in a container, we can say that it’s a beautiful, low-maintenance perennial shrub.

Harvesting & Working With Henna

Leaves are typically harvested once plants are mature and well established. They’re dried and ground into a fine powder, which can then be mixed with water or another liquid to make a paste.

Dyeing Hair with Homegrown Henna

For this experiment, I harvested leaves from our mother tree before the freeze came. Then ground them into a powder. I have fairly long hair and mixed 140 grams of homegrown henna powder (that is the amount I happened to have) with about 2 or 3 cups of coffee, which is supposed to help make the color darker. Then I let it sit for several hours for the dye to release.

I don’t think I got the consistency quite right (it was still pretty clumpy and made a mess), but I made it work.

I coated my hair with it, wrapped it in a plastic bag with a cloth overtop, then let it sit for 3 hours. That was as long as I could stand.

The result was a nice reddish brown color!

*For reference, my hair is typically a light brown with a few grey streaks running through.

Dyeing Skin with Henna

We have fun dying our skin with henna whenever there’s a chance, but we haven’t worked with our homegrown henna much in this way yet. It’ll happen eventually. Developing relationships with plants takes time. :) To give an idea of what henna looks like when applied to the skin, these are some henna designs Cristen made with store-bought cones.

After a few hours, the henna will dry and flake off. Your dyed skin will be a lighter color at first, and will be much darker by the next day. It’ll start fade after a week or so.

This is of course a very simplified post about henna, and there are many other ways to work with this plant that are beyond our scope. We encourage anyone interested in the cultural and ceremonial uses of henna to learn directly from the communities and practitioners who have a deep relationship with it.