I opened the box to reveal a small collection of galls. They’re about the size of a large marble, round, and mostly brown. Nearly all of them have a perfectly circular hole, 2mm across and black in appearance. They look into the depth of the gall, and show the cave where a wasp transformed from an egg, to larvae, finally emerging as a wasp. Today, a small red wasp looked up at me from inside the box. Defenceless, we look at each other. The wasp, likely hungry and confused as to how it ended up in a box, gingerly makes it escape.
I’ve only met one gall wasp in our workshop. We have always tried to take only the galls with a hole, signifying the departure of the gall wasp. But, as always, it’s complicated. The galls can sometimes have additional wasps inside – inquiline wasps which are, effectively, lodgers. Without destroying the gall, it’s impossible to know if one hole means all wasps are gone. Wanting to understand more about the appearance of a vacated gall, I once pulled apart the gall of an Andricus foecundatrix wasp. The galls look like little artichokes, and get fluffy as they age. These galls are easily pulled apart, and have an inner small hard shell which contains a single larva. I’ve yet to find one with an obvious exit hole, and so I leave them be.
The Wikipedia page for Andricus kollari tells you exactly how crazy it can get inside these galls with eight potential species of lodgers, and an additional thirteen species of parasitic species that can eat the host wasp, the lodgers, and each other. Leaving intact galls on the tree is as much about the life of the gall wasp as it is about preserving the makers of future galls. Fewer wasps mean fewer galls, and there are already too few to risk further reduction.
In England, there are more than 60 gall-forming wasps that use the oak trees. Each species of wasp creates a different style of gall on the tree – sometimes two. The injection of the egg into a bud or the flower results in a different genetic mutation in the tree and a different shape of gall. Apart from the ethics, there is no difference in ink that’s made from any part of the oak tree: galls, acorn caps, and bark all make the same ochre-brown ink, which turns black when iron sulphate is added.
The advantage of the galls is they can be found year-round and there is the history and romanticism of writing and drawing from an orb that once held the beginning of a life. There are several types of galls that are used for ink-making: marble and knopper being the most common.
For several years, I’ve been looking for galls to make ink – usually finding enough across a year to make a batch of ink. On the high moor, where trees are few and far between, I have a small circuit of trees I check once or twice a year. There’s a small oak beside the fence line on the lane to Anton’s farm, another behind the village library, and a few more on the farm where our workshop is. When the leaves have fallen, my partner and I go looking for galls. They’re much easier to find when they aren’t hidden by leaves. There’s often a whoop for joy when we find galls that are both in reach and vacated. Sometimes we’ll find as many as half a dozen on a single walk, but it takes several dozen to make a small batch of ink. By contrast, in a lowland park, half a mile from the boundaries of Dartmoor, it takes only a short fifteen minutes to easily find enough galls to make a batch of ink.
To make iron gall ink, you will need enough oak galls. At least a handful for a small amount of ink, more if you want a deep black. We keep our oak galls in the small cardboard box that our pencil sharpener came in. When there are enough, we make ink. There are as many recipes for oak gall ink as there are people who make it. The monks in medieval times scribed their recipes, as did Jane Austen. The principles are nearly always the same: crush the galls, boil them in water (or soak if you have patience), add iron sulphate (rusty nails are a modern substitution), and a little gum Arabic and that’s it. Simple, black ink. Months in the making if you include the time to grow the wasps, wait for them to hatch, and find enough galls for a batch of ink.
You can, of course, buy galls as well. Look for suppliers that support small scale wool dyers. Each type of gall from each region produces a slight different colour. The Aleppo galls have a reputation for making a blue-purple black, whereas the British marble galls yield a warmer brown-black. It’s up to you on whether you choose to forage or purchase your galls. If you’re impatient, or you live in a region without oak trees, purchasing may be your only option. Having met a gall wasp, and having pulled apart a gall to see what was inside, I no longer feel it’s appropriate for me to buy my galls. It shouldn’t matter. They’re empty. The artefact of a life that’s carried on. Yet.
Iron gall ink transforms on the page from deep brown to black. It’s the oxidisation process that makes that final transformation happen. If you find your inks are transforming back to brown after a day or two, it’s likely you’ve added too much iron to your ink.
On the page, the ink continues to transform as the iron sulphate further reacts with moist air to create sulphuric acid. Not in sufficient quantities to be dangerous to you, but in a few dozen years, or perhaps a few hundred, this chemical process will slowly continue and eventually eat through your paper.
There are wonderful examples of the gradual deterioration of pages in old manuscripts that have, essentially, been eaten away to lace. Not quite what the original authors had intended, and not quite what the conservationists like to see, but the effects are beautiful. (The effects can be slowed with a bath of calcium phytate.) Like its cousin, the paper wasp, the gall that formed the marble gall wasp’s home, slowly eats away at the page.
Collecting over days, months, and years is not a hardship. The regular walks to familiar places have allowed me to learn more about the moor. The excitement of seeing new galls (even when they’re intact) has only grown. The harder it is to find the galls, the greater the delight in finding them. There are easier places to find galls, but I choose the big skies of the high moor, the lonely trees, and the generation of wasps whose homes have been telling stories for centuries.