JOHNS ISLAND, SC.- On a spring morning nearly a decade ago, Leigh Magar was out walking rural Johns Island, off Charleston, South Carolina, with her “snake stick,” a wooden cane with a jangling Greek goat bell that she carries to ward off loathsome reptiles.

As she tells it — and she swears this story is true — a beautiful blue dragonfly alighted on her stick and then encircled her, before fluttering toward the woods. She followed it into a thicket of pines, where she discovered a patch of wild blue indigo hidden among the trees.

Magar, a textile artist and dressmaker partial to indigo-dyed jumpers and indigo-stained silk ribbons tucked into her hair, is at the artful forefront of the “seed to stitch” movement — the growing, harvesting and processing of Indigo suffruticosa, a robust plant that flourishes in the tropics and produces a deep, cherished ocean-blue color, one of humankind’s oldest dyes.

This benign-looking bush is used in designing garments and batiks. It was a major export in 18th-century South Carolina. Like rice and cotton, the lucrative indigo crop was dependent on the skills and labor of enslaved Africans, who tended the plantation fields and extracted the dye in preparation for shipment to England for its burgeoning textile industry.

Today, the revival of indigo by a diverse group of artists, designers and farmers is hardly confined to South Carolina, where it is steeped in the vat of history and eccentricity. In the United States, the passion for indigo dovetails with a growing appreciation for nontoxic plant-based dyes, including turmeric and marigolds, and the renewed focus on Africa’s role in contemporary fashion, spotlighted by recent museum exhibitions like “African Fashion” at the Brooklyn Museum and the Portland Art Museum, and by “Blue Gold: The Art and Science of Indigo,” which opened at the Mingei International Museum in San Diego on Sept. 14, part of the Getty’s major PST Art initiative.

Fashion designers like Awa Meité van Til, who is based in Bamako, Mali, draw inspiration from ancestors. In Africa, her grandmother redipped her clothes in what the older woman called “the blue of life” when they aged, van Til recalled by email. In Lagos, Nigeria, and other major cities, aderi, a woven indigo-dyed cloth historically made by the Yoruba, is a fashion staple.

“Indigo is a living tradition,” said Christine Checinska, the senior curator of African and diaspora textiles and fashion for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, who organized “Africa Fashion.” “Makers are looking back to look forward.”

Madame Magar and the Hermit Monk

Magar was drawn to indigo after a career designing hand-stitched hats and fedoras for Barneys New York from her shabby chic cottage in Charleston. In 2015, she and husband, Johnny Tucker, an architect and artist, moved to a house on Johns Island, where the entry is enlivened by the spectacle of a small airplane blown on its side during Hurricane Hugo and a polyurethane dinosaur egg.

Madame Magar, as she is known professionally, became infatuated with the idea of creating art from Mother Nature and began reading histories about Johns Island indigo. At the time, indigo seeds were hard to come by. Then, a local botanist told her about a “hermit monk” deep in the woods who not only had seeds but a thriving indigo garden.

On a late summer day so humid it turned bodies into wetlands, Magar agreed to take a reporter to visit the “hermit monk” and witness the final stage of the process.

Producing indigo dye is a bit like making beer, she explained, as we piled into her indigo Subaru. The leaves are steeped and fermented in water, but that doesn’t produce the breathtaking color. To get there, she adds a reducing agent (her favorite is henna) that removes the water’s oxygen molecules, a complex process prone to error. This is indigo’s happy place, where it forms a deep attachment to silk, cotton or other fibers saturated in the brew. When those fibers are exposed to air, magic happens. As she talked, Magar navigated the route with her indigo-covered cellphone while gripping the steering wheel with her indigo-stained hands.

The “hermit” turned out to be an affable Eastern Orthodox monk named Father John, who lives down a rutted sand road. In his black cassock, he had a slightly bohemian air, with a bountiful silver beard and hair pulled back in a tight bun.

“I’m unused to having guests,” he said apologetically, before proceeding to serve an eight-course vegetarian meze in which most of the ingredients, including Macedonian peppers, came from his garden.

John is adept at “resist techniques,” in which certain areas of a textile are blocked from receiving the dye, most often by applying molten wax (the process is often called batik). He prefers making a golden paste out of rice bran, which he then applies through intricately hand-cut stencils to create patterns on fabric, in a centuries-old Japanese technique known as katazome.

He pulled out a small plastic bag full of tiny brown curlicues; they were indigo seed pods (you could hear them rattling).

He demonstrated their alchemy in the yard, in tubs — one dye steeped with dried leaves, and a deeper color, from concentrate, its bubbling iridescent surface resembling a liquid stained-glass window.

When John immersed his stenciled textile into the brew, it turned a distressing pickle green. But as he fished it out and exposed it to the air, it transformed into a breathtaking blue, enhanced by intricate white patterns where the rice paste had been. He attributes his creativity to “moments of mania.”

Magar explained that this providential connection with John, and her discovery of wild indigo growing near her home, set her on her “life’s path, a calling” — one that has included installations at the South Carolina State Museum, in Columbia, and in Tryon, North Carolina, for a Nina Simone-themed group exhibit in Simone’s birthplace (Magar stitched a portrait of the legendary singer out of scraps of dyed indigo dress fabric).

Magar’s home dye studio on the screened porch is a Hogwarts-like jumble of potions in jars and bottles, including goldenrod, sweet gum, muscadine leaves and assorted bones.

The rich and tangled history of South Carolina indigo became personal when a neighbor on the island informed Magar that she was living on a former indigo plantation. “I had to go through the light and dark of it,” she explained over a lilting aria of frogs and cicadas. “It was, ‘Open your eyes, white girl.’”

Telling Indigo’s Inclusive Story

Historians often credited Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722-1793), who managed her father’s plantation near Charleston, with pioneering the state’s indigo industry. Using land unsuitable for growing rice, she directed enslaved persons to extract the dye through a series of brick or wood vats, including the grueling process of agitating the fermented indigo liquid, or “liquor,” with paddles.

Pinckney’s status as an innovator has crumbled in recent decades as historians uncovered the uncredited contributions of enslaved Africans, many abducted from regions known for indigo cultivation and dyeing, which likely helped bolster profits reaped by Pinckney and others. Nic Butler, a historian at the Charleston County Public Library, compares “the Pinckney cult” to the notion that Elvis Presley single-handedly “invented” rock ‘n’ roll.

“Indigo was the product of a system of forced labor,” Butler said. “One could choose to ignore that history as a painful reminder of past problems, or embrace it as a vehicle for telling a more inclusive story about our shared past,” he said.

The earliest finding was believed to be 6,200 years ago, an indigo-dyed textile excavated from a ceremonial mound in Peru. The colorfast dye survives in the linen that wraps Egyptian mummies, in medieval and Renaissance tapestries, and in centuries-old Asian and African textiles.

“Every country that does indigo honors ancestors through this magical blue,” said Arianne King Comer, an artist who first learned batiking at Howard University and has an indigo plant tattoo above her ankle.

“It aligned me,” she said of her indigo education, which began in 1992, when she made her first trip to Nigeria on a grant to study with Nike Davies-Okundaye, a celebrated textile artist who has built centers for young people to learn traditional arts and crafts.

King Comer currently lives in an indigo-painted trailer on Wadmalaw Island, just over the bridge from Johns Island, her gloriously painted indigo mailbox jazzing up a country road.

Her “studio” is a wooden plank resting on two-by-fours, with incense to ward off mosquitoes and a clothesline for drying textiles between oak trees tinseled with Spanish moss.

King Comer’s indigo-dyed tunics and silk scarves, sold on her website, practically spill out of her trailer, many employing shibori, a Japanese technique in which cloth is twisted or folded to create different patterns. Electric frying pan at the ready, she demonstrated her batiking skill by dipping a Pakistani imprinting tool into hot wax and stamping prints onto a cotton fabric. Then, she wrapped the textile around a broom handle and plunged it into a vessel of dye.

She will stay in her DIY outpost until she is able to build a center honoring historical and cultural crafts techniques, through her nonprofit, IBILE. Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Acres of Ancestry/Black Agrarian Fund, a cooperative that supports efforts to secure and protect Black farmlands. She is also an artist-in-residence at the Indigo Arts Alliance in Portland, Maine, traveling with the tools of her trade and a salmon smoker (her culinary skills are also in demand).

One of the beautiful aspects of batiking, she said, is that “you relax yourself from perfection. There is no ‘oops’ because you can always change your mind.”

Forging a Farm-to-Fabric Economy

At the Marshview Community Organic Farm about 80 miles south on St. Helena Island, Sara Reynolds Green grows indigo as a way to teach young people to pass down their history to future generations. “They need to know their ancestral legacy and their duty as descendants,” she said.

Youngsters learn to farm okra and other crops grown by their Gullah Geechee forebears. Green was born on what is now Marshview, 20 acres purchased by her maternal great-grandfather Robert Green, in 1865, when he was four years out of slavery.

Houses around South Carolina are often painted “haint blue” around the windows to prevent evil spirits from coming inside; many, including the Greens’, were built by family members. “The key to our survival was community,” she said.

To Green and her husband Bill, a chef whose Gullah Grub restaurant is nearby, the indigo revival presents an opportunity to build local cultural and economic wealth. To that end, Sara is serving as a mentor to farmers of limited resources through a Department of Agriculture grant organized by the International Center for Indigo Culture, a Charleston nonprofit dedicated to forging a “farm to fabric” economy.

“Maybe y’all are wearing bluejeans,” Green will say to the young farmers in her summer programs. “Where do you think that dye comes from?” Their incredulous response: “Is that really from a shrub?”

Until recently, however, most indigo for denim was derived from petroleum-based synthetics containing toxic chemicals, which cause major environmental pollution when dyes are released in rivers and streams. In 2012, Sarah Bellos, a young Tennessean and graduate of Cornell University’s School of Agriculture and Life Sciences, decided to experiment with industrial-scale natural indigo, partnering with tobacco farmers easing out of the crop.

Her company, Stony Creek Colors, now works mostly with farmers in Florida to produce indigo sustainably. Clients include Levi Strauss, which makes a plant-based 501 jean and has invested $4.8 million with Lewis & Clark Agrifood, in Stony Creek.

The indigo arts revival has also taken root in cities: Keisha Cameron, of High Hog Farm outside Atlanta, grows four types of indigo, including woad, a European plant that yields a weaker blue but tolerates chilly climes. And in a converted auto body shop in central Baltimore, textile artist and farmer Kenya Miles established Blue Light Junction, a studio that includes a natural dye garden, an artist residency program and a lab that processes and teaches about natural dyes.

‘We’re the New History’

At the Dawn of Hope Plantation in remote Green Pond, South Carolina, about 50 miles west of Charleston, Precious Jennings, an artist who comes from four generations of Iowa farmers, tended a quarter-acre of indigo plants on verdant, sun-dappled land where the original slave cabin and a cemetery with the overgrown tombs of rice planters still stand.

Jennings wore indigo-dyed pants she made out of coffee sacks. She farms and processes dye for CHI Designs, a company specializing in indigo garments, accessories and interiors. Her practice combines theater, dance and somatic arts — and agriculture. “Farmers are high-caliber improvisers,” she said. Caring for some 300 indigo plants in the blazing sun, she added, “turns your nervous system on.”

She had a visitor that day: Jermaine Euland, the founder of the African American Farmers Association, which he founded in 1991 to support Black farmers who were growing industrial hemp.

The spectacle of indigo nouveau flourishing on a vast plantation not far from where his ancestors were enslaved was “surreal,” he allowed. “It’s a daunting feeling to walk the grounds and feel the spirits of a traumatic past still there.” But he considers the newfound embrace of indigo by Black and white artist-farmers to be a positive development. The first thing fellow farmers from out of state now ask to see is his indigo — an object of agricultural desire that has come full circle.

“We’re the new history,” he said. “They’re referring to us now.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.