If you dye your Easter eggs using natural botanical dyes, be prepared to become a bit breathless when you pull the resulting eggs from the dye mix. Using natural materials to make dyes creates spellbinding colors much richer and more complex than any food coloring-based hue.

In her book A Garden to Dye For, Chris McLaughlin shows how to use common foods and plants from your garden to create natural dyes for eggs and fabrics. The author got her start with natural plant dyes two decades ago when she began pounding flowers to extract their colors.

McLaughlin’s book is chock full of photos of naturally dyed items and features more than 40 garden plants that can be used to make a rainbow of colors for your eggs and more. She dyes with hot and cold dye methods. The latter is her favorite, because the process results in intense colors.

Here McLaughlin shares her cold dye method for your Easter eggs.

Pick plants from the garden. Good choices include rudbeckia, calendula, coreopsis, St. John’s wort, marigold, and chamomile. Make certain that the plant materials you gather from the garden are not toxic. Dyes for eggs to be eaten should always be made only from edible plants.

Use kitchen scraps. Try beets, blackberries, blueberries, onion skins, red cabbage, and turmeric.

Simmer the dye materials separately in pots of water for 20-25 minutes. Remove the materials from the water.

Pour each dye color into a glass jar or bowl and add 1/8 cup of vinegar. Let the liquid cool.

Add hardboiled eggs to each dye color. Leave the eggs in the solutions for at least an hour and up to 10 hours. (If you plan to eat the eggs and soak them for more than one hour, keep them soaking in the dye mix in the refrigerator).

Note how you made your favorite dye colors. To ensure that you can recreate your masterpiece hues, record what materials you used, how much, and how long you kept the eggs in the dye.

Julie Bawden-Davis is a garden writer and master gardener, who since 1985 has written for publications such as Organic Gardening, Wildflower, Better Homes and Gardens and The Los Angeles Times. She is the author of seven books, including Reader’s Digest Flower Gardening, Fairy Gardening, The Strawberry Story, and Indoor Gardening the Organic Way, and is the founder of HealthyHouseplants.com.