Winter is a time of rest and restoration and I do plenty of that in the dark cold months.
In past years I have tried to carry on making baskets but decided battling a cold studio and an iced-over soaking tank isn’t worth it. I now go with the season and spend a lot of time planning the year ahead, catching up on admin, filing my tax return and generally hibernating. Now we grow our own willow, however, I also have an excuse to get outside. Winter, when the leaves have fallen and the sap is down, is harvest time.
When I met James, also a keen basket maker, we formed Marsh Willow, and started planting willow on a field next to where we live at Iden Lock. Now, eight years later all my basketry work and classes use our home grown willow. Harvesting and sorting the willow in winter has become part of the annual cycle of my work.
For most people the huge weeping willows come to mind when they think of willow but there are many more types of willow (Salix species). Just take a boat trip down the Rother and you will see several different types overhanging the Rother and if you live on the marsh you probably recognise a few more varieties. It is however a bit of a myth that willow needs wet ground to grow well. It’s more that it can grow on wet ground when other tree species can’t, so that’s what you will often see.
Willow is a plant that hybridises easily and consequently there are thousands of cultivars. That’s not to say all of these will be good for weaving. Of the several thousand cultivars, there are just a few hundred recognised as good for basket making. Some have been bred specifically for weaving while others were found naturally.
Willow is easy to grow and is started off by pushing eight or ten inch cuttings into the ground in the winter. They will take a few years to get established but after three years you will be getting a good bunch of rods from each plant. Every year in winter, when the sap is down and the leaves have fallen, the rods are cut back to the stool (stump) from which they grow.
We have about two thousand stools, each producing around 20 to 50 rods a year. Being on the Marsh we are often a few inches deep in water while harvesting. It’s hard work cutting everything by hand but a great excuse to get outside in the winter and we have a couple of days when we welcome volunteers which helps enormously.
Once the willow is cut it has to be sorted into lengths, tied into bundles and stacked off the ground to start drying. Some of it will be stood in water until it starts to shoot, ready for stripping the bark off to obtain white willow.
As a basketmaker I love the fact that I now grow all the willow I use here at Iden Lock. For years I bought in willow from commercial suppliers in Somerset but it always worried me that this was grown with the use of herbicides and pesticides, because of the damage the chemicals can cause wildlife and, probably me, when using the willow. As we are growing organically here at Marsh Willow we have used ground cover to suppress the weeds and planted hedges to attract beneficial predators that we hope will eat any pests we might get. We are also hoping that growing a variety of species will mean that if one gets a pest our whole crop won’t be devastated.
The bigger rods are used to make garden structures and coracles and the smaller ones for baskets. I try to use softer willow varieties when teaching as often other hands aren’t as strong as mine and so struggle with the tougher varieties. Different varieties of willow have different coloured bark and look great when combined in baskets.
If interested in learning basketmaking, please visit the website for upcoming classes: https://willowweaver.com/tuition-courses
Image Credits: Julie Gurr , Louise Rose Photography .