Choice of material…

Homegrown versus commercial willow -

I planted willow long before I had any particular skill in relation to basketry. I planted it badly, in ignorance but in good faith - knowing, even as an amateur, that a willow bed takes a few years to establish. I did, to my credit, spend time researching varieties of willow, but it was a challenge to make decisions on what to plant when I had no-one to advise me. Being new to the craft, I had little experience in knowing what would work for me out of the hundreds of varieties available. I selected 6 varieties initially, ordering unnecessarily expensive cuttings by thinking that 2-foot cuttings would stand a better chance of establishing than 1-foot cuttings. This isn’t true. Willow cuttings, generally standardised at 12 inches in length, can be planted to any height. Provided you are able to get at least 6 inches in the ground, they all stand an equal chance of taking, depending on the right environmental factors. Many people choose to plant longer cuttings, pollarding them rather than cutting them back to the base, so that they have to stoop less when harvesting and save their backs considerable wear and tear. Buying longer cuttings was my first mistake, and although it wasn’t necessarily problematic, I spent more than I needed to.

I spent time considering where to plant my cuttings and found what I thought to be the perfect patch of land at the bottom of the field. It was an area we fondly referred to as butterfly meadow – a patch of unfarmable land, boggy in places in the winter, mostly dry in the summer, surrounded on three sides by trees but open in the middle. This choice of geographical location was my next mistake. Willow needs water to survive but doesn’t necessarily like to be in standing water, and although I recognised this and avoided planting in the boggy areas, this limited me to the rear of the patch. This site was closer to the trees and therefore considerably more shaded. Willow likes the sun, so I had inadvertently limited their exposure, resulting in reduced growth.

Finally, all my reading suggested that willow should be planted through some kind of weed supressing membrane. This went against everything that I was trying to achieve – planting and working with a natural material, so I decided to grow it without using a membrane. This was my third mistake. Willow does grow beautifully in our climate, and often needs little more than to be simply pushed into the ground. However, in order to thrive, it does not like competition from weeds, particularly in its first year of growth. It is possible to grow willow without using any kind of weed supressing membrane, but you need to be fastidious in keeping the weeds away, particularly in the first year. I didn’t know this, my site was too far from the house and my time too limited to be a slave to weeding.

This patch of willow has never thrived. With hindsight, my choice of varieties was not terrible, but the location of the site was wrong - both from a land type and access to sunlight perspective – and using a weed supressing membrane would have greatly reduced the competition from weeds. My valuable cuttings were not given the best chance. They are still there, and I pop down annually to mourn their lack of vigour. I harvest a few rods, and have used some for cuttings, so all has not been completely lost. However, the truth is that they were a relatively expensive, time consuming, and labour-intensive mistake.

Why then, with this as the background, do I persevere in growing my own willow when it is readily available commercially?

The answer is that willow is a naturally growing material, native to our climate, and I want to make my pieces from home grown willow that I have nurtured from a cutting. By the time I use it for weaving, I will have fretted over it: watched it grow from a few inches to several feet over the course of a few months; seen it progress from providing a handful of rods in its first year, to an armful a couple of years down the line. I will have hurt my knees planting it, given myself blisters cutting it and then strained my back stooping to collect it. However, I will also have stroked it in the summer months and marvelled at the difference in density between first, second and third year beds. I will have seen it house birds and insect life and touched every single rod several times by the time they are woven into their final piece. My rods will have been hand cut by me, with occasional company from my cat during the stark January days; hand sorted, stored, and then hand sorted once again before being soaked and woven. These are single origin pieces. I know each rod, and I know that nothing other than care, sun, wind and rain has touched its surface. It is a slow, time-consuming process, to which I give all of January and much of February too. That is time when I cannot work on making pieces, but it is part of my story.

I am not against commercially available willow – it is hugely important to our craft and relied upon by many Basketmakers who don’t have the land or time to grow their own. I have bought plenty over the years and continue to do so for very specialised willow, most notably white willow which undergoes further processing that I cannot do here in the volume that I require. But growing my own gives me guardianship over the varieties I choose. I can select for colour, length, tone, interest, rather than simply buying what’s available. I can avoid the bun fight that is trying to order certain varieties in popular lengths when they are limited in number, and instead focus on what I can use that others can’t. Knowing that every environment offers its own unique growing conditions, my harvest of a specific variety might have tonal variations that differ to another growers’ harvest of the same variety.

I have, for the most part, settled now on the varieties I love (although there’s always room for an addition if something special catches my eye). I have also found the ideal growing location, in the lower side of the top field on our smallholding which is in glorious sunshine from dawn to dusk (when the sun shines at least) thus giving my willow the best possible chance for strong seasonal growth. I now plant through silage wrap as a weed suppressing membrane. It is not perfect, it’s a compromise, but I only use damaged wrap that is useless for its intended purpose and would otherwise be sent to landfill - my current roll, which will probably fill all my future requirements, was runover by a tractor so is misshapen and would not fit the bale wrap machine. I also cherish the flow of the seasonal tasks – harvesting in January and February: sorting, taking cuttings and planting more, so that my willow bed grows slowly and manageably year on year. It is an organic, rhythmical process.

Interestingly, now that I’ve learnt my lessons, I find that there are lots of willow growers offering plentiful cuttings of exciting varieties, often with excellent planting advice too. Hopefully it will help others avoid the problems I have encountered, and it is a fact of which I am well aware, that ordering willow commercially would be much easier, allowing a plentiful supply of beautifully consistent material. It would save weeks of my time every year, but I’m stubborn to the core, and hold closely to the importance I place on growing, storing, soaking and making all from my own site wherever possible.