Help preserve our future
West Dean is part of a registered charity and relies on the support of generous donors, friends, legacies to help us deliver world-class education in conservation and the creative arts and maintain our award-winning gardens.
Bryan Whitehead
Bryan was born in Vancouver, Canada and has lived in Japan for 28 years. He lives in an old silk farming house with his adjacent tea, mulberry and indigo fields in a mountain village just outside Tokyo. He continues and old local tradition of breeding silk moths, rearing the silkworms, reeling and spinning silk from the cocoons then colouring the silk with natural local dyes and eventually weaving fine work on traditional Japanese hand looms. He has grown indigo for 20 years, processing the leaves into indigo paste and then fermenting the composted material in a dye vat. He is an accomplished indigo dyer.
His farmhouse is a well-known destination to study indigo and silk-related traditional Japanese handcraft.