It was about a decade ago when Patricia Bishop of Nova Scotia’s TapRoot Farms realized there might be a future in growing not just food, but fabric. A subscriber to the farm’s produce boxes connected her with some people at NSCAD University—Nova Scotia’s major art and design school—who were working with natural fibres and dyes. They told her they wanted to access local materials like linen, but there were no good-quality ones available. 

“That was a lightbulb moment for me,” Bishop says of the realization that she could plant flax to turn into linen yarn and fabric. “I thought, oh my goodness, our farm grows food for people. Maybe it can also grow textiles and clothes.”

Before technology introduced synthetic fabrics to the world, local cloth producers were present all over the province. “All parts of rural Nova Scotia were producing linen domestically,” says Jennifer Green, associate professor of textiles at NSCAD. “It was prolific until the early 1900s.” The remainder of the century saw a production decline that led to a more or less total loss of the skill set and knowledge required. But now, thanks to the efforts of passionate pioneers like Bishop and Green, small-scale linen production is seeing a resurgence, both in Nova Scotia and elsewhere.

It was in the early 2000s, when Green was studying weaving at NSCAD, that she fell in love with linen. “I was really captivated,” she says. “I loved the structure of it. I loved the dimensional stability. I loved the lustre.” But when her instructors suggested she learn to spin flax fibre into thread to gain more control over her weaving, she was told that in all of Nova Scotia, there was only one person, journalist and historian Barbara Hines, who had that skill. 

Luckily, Hines was able to teach Green, and her spinning expertise came with a side of the province’s linen-related history and culture. “That was the first time I really started connecting this growing appreciation for linen to history and land and people,” Green says. “There was a sense of this real cultural loss that we’d sustained.”

Before technology introduced synthetic fabrics, local cloth producers were present all over Nova Scotia.

She also learned more about the environmental benefits of using linen rather than carbon-intensive, highly polluting industrial textiles. “Flax requires very little irrigation and very low chemical inputs like herbicides and pesticides,” she says. The plant also has many uses—the seeds, of course, can be eaten or replanted, and the shives (the parts remaining after the fibre is removed) used in a building material called flaxcrete. In Belgium, Green adds, she visited a linen factory where flax dust was collected to be made into highly flammable fire bricks. “There’s really no waste,” she says.

Linen isn’t easy to make. It starts with a flax plant, which, when it grows up, contains strands of fibre within its stem. “The point where the fibre transforms to thread or yarn is the moment that the word changes from flax to linen,” writes Raven Ranson in her book Homegrown Linen: Transforming Flaxseed into Fibre. “Before that can happen, the flax is pulled, sheafed, stooked, dried, broken, scutched, and hackled.” The rich vocabulary speaks to the English language’s long relationship with the linen-making process, and the quick translation is that the flax plant’s stems don’t become fibre—then thread or yarn and fabric—without a lot of sweat equity. They must be picked, softened up through exposure to moisture and broken down by mechanical means before the usable fibre is separated and combed, ready to be spun. 

As her career progressed, Green developed plans of starting up a research farm, where she could test various flax varieties and growing and processing techniques. “I was looking for land and I wasn’t having much luck,” she says. Then one day she had her own epiphany: why not partner with existing farmers instead, so she could teach them how to grow flax in exchange for gathering some of the fibre for her work? That moment was the birth of the Flaxmobile, a travelling research and teaching project now going into its third year.

Every spring Green gathers a group of volunteer farmers, then journeys around the province to guide them through the flax-growing process. Farmers get 50% of the crop to use as they wish, as well as a planting log Green writes that records “everything that we went through” from sowing to harvest. In 2022, she kept the remaining half of the fibre to spin, weave, cut and sew into work shirts she plans to give to the farmers as gifts. Last year, she paired farmers with local craftspeople, like jewellery makers and slow fashion companies, to produce goods from the crops. “It’s still in the small-scale proof-of-concept stage,” she says. “But we’re hopefully giving the farmers a sense that there is a potential market for this.”

As for Bishop, from the moment she decided to grow textiles, TapRoot began including fibre in its farm ecosystem: linen, wool, even a few nettles. Learning to grow the flax was one thing. The real challenge, Bishop says, was the processing. “It’s really expensive to start a new industry,” she says. It took them a long time to find the right size equipment—they even designed and built some of their own—and there is still machinery on their wish list, like a spinning machine that would allow them to process the long fibres they currently set aside. Also possibly on deck? A puller, which would harvest their flax crop (historically pulled by hand), allowing them to expand how much they grow.

Flax requires very little irrigation and very low chemical inputs like herbicides and pesticides.

TapRoot’s equipment has processed fibre from New Brunswick, Québec, even as far as Texas, and it’s instrumental in helping Green’s community of farmers and craftspeople spin their own flax into figurative gold. Bishop has also run plenty of experiments over the years, like the community-supported linen project that had subscribers receiving a finished piece a month—until she realized it was too ambitious a project to keep up with. She also ran a challenge with new design graduates, to create useful items at a reasonable price point. “Reasonable” turned out to be a relative concept. “They made rugs and bags and placemats,” she says. “The items are very expensive, but they’re really beautiful.” 

TapRoot has grown quite a bit of flax over the past 10 years, but in some ways, its lasting contribution has been to the community—which is what they’re motivated by, alongside the benefits to the planet of slower fibre production. “We really believe it’s important to have this kind of rural infrastructure,” Bishop says. “At some point in the future, we’re going to need to have the capacity within our communities to feed and clothe ourselves. And I want it to be available.”