Scotland
was very green last week when I went to the University
of St. Andrews for the Woven
Communities Symposium, and I couldn’t stop looking at the beautiful grass
everywhere. There is a dust bowl in my garden where the grass normally
grows, as there hasn’t been any rain for over a month with temperatures close to
30C for most of that time.
A group of basket makers, conservators, archaeologists,
philosophers, anthropologists, educators, museum directors, curators
and artists met for two days to hear fragments
of each others research and views on baskets and basket making. This Symposium
was similar to the
conference at University
of East Anglia last year with several
of the same speakers. This one, however, had a Scottish focus to it. It was initiated
by Stephanie Bunn, a textile artist, willow sculptor and lecturer
in Social Anthropology at St.
Andrews who is currently engaged in research into the vernacular
baskets of Scotland
with the assistance of the
Scottish Basketmakers Circle.
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Image from Scottish Country Life by Alexander Fenton,
John Donald Publishers Ltd.1989
Threshers on Foula |
This symposium had a practical
element each day which the academics present seemed to particularly enjoy. One
of the anthropologists told me he had never been to such an enjoyable symposium
and that it was because the makers and artists were all
so passionate about their work.
For me it
was an interesting, if tightly packed,
two days and although
we were not a huge group there were still some people there that I never had a
chance to talk to. Greta Bertram has written a
good description of the event on the
Heritage Crafts Blog.
The penultimate session was a round table and open floor
discussion about the future of the craft but we had very little time for it. I found it to be the least satisfactory part of the event with ideas and observations
left hanging in the air. I am an optimist and it seems, to me, that the
cultural and economic climate in Europe at this time is particularly propitious for engagement with the
craft of basket making by many different sectors of society.
“Basket making” is
really a misnomer for all
that this craft encompasses because it is possible, with these materials
and techniques, to make plenty of things that are not baskets: jewellery, buildings,
sculpture, boats, fences, shoes, furniture.
The list is endless, and much of it can be
done with little money and without causing undue harm to our ecosystem. Perhaps, it is both these things that
make it so right for the time we are living in.
Baskets, traditionally,
have always been sustainable, being made with
the materials of the maker’s immediate
environment. Ultimately biodegradable and requiring no fossil fuels for their production
they are the perfect model for a contemporary product. These are exactly the qualities
that every product designer is now seeking for their products.There is a strong movement in Britain
and many other parts of Europe and America
towards the local and organic. I see no reason
why anyone wanting to make a living from "basket making" should not have a ready
market for their work as long as they do not compromise the sustainability and
authenticity of their products.
It was surprising then, to hear one of the speakers at the
symposium make a point of stating categorically
that it is impossible to grow willow organically on a
commercial scale.
Yet, prior to the invention and marketing of pesticides in about 1940 all
willow was grown organically and certainly in
the 19th
and early20th Century much of it was grown for commercial
purposes. An example being
Chiswick Eyot in the Thames,
where, between 1800 and 1934 willows were grown for the local
basket making industry and without the aid of pesticides.
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| Chiswick Eyot |
The commercial willow growers in the UK are mainly located in Somerset and the reason they may find it difficult to grow organically
is all about contemporary agricultural practice
and the scale of it. These willow growers,
like most other non-organic farmers, grow their crops in vast fields of
single varieties and like most of the other farmers suffer with all
the attendant pest and disease problems associated with such practices. Given
the time scale between planting and harvesting
the first willow crop – usually about 3 years – it is
understandable that the Somerset growers
are reluctant to rip up their fields and start again with smaller
parcels of land and more varieties in order to grow organically. As willows have been grown in the Somerset Levels for centuries, long before pesticides were invented, they could perhaps find out how to do it from old maps of the area.
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| Commercial willow crops on the Somerset Levels |
In an appendix to the Cultivation and Use of basket Willows
produced in 2001 by the Basketmakers Association and IACR Long Ashton Research
Station there is a list of the chemicals that
have been tested on willow beds for weed control and it reads like a poisoners
bible. It isn’t just weeds, there are plenty of insects and fungi that like
willow, but one of the main reasons commercial
growers are spraying their crops routinely from May onwards with pesticides is to
control “button top”, caused by the button top midge Rhabdophaga hetcrobia, which results in branched or stunted willow
rods. I remember visiting Helen Tyler, a commercial
grower in Somerset, some years ago to
find her painstakingly trimming tiny branches from the tips of thousands of
rods in order to sell them. This more than likely negated any small
profit she may have hoped for from their sale
but she did it because she thought she would be unable to sell them unless the
bolts looked perfect. Perhaps the growers need to ask their customers if they wouldn’t
prefer to accept that some willows may have branched tips, if they knew that it
meant they did not have to be sprayed.
Few of the main grower’s web sites discuss the company’s
spraying policies and neither do they offer non-sprayed or organic willows. I
imagine therefore that a lot of the people buying these willows assume that they
are buying a natural, organic product because
it looks like one and not one that could indirectly be harming the
environment in which it grows, and that also contributes
to yet more profits for Monsanto et al!
Ultimately, it comes down to education, and this is something we briefly touched on in the discussion, but which seems to me to be very important. The general public in the UK, despite being the purchasers of large quantities of basket ware, (according to UK trade statistics over 28 million pounds worth of imported wickerwork and basketwork so far in 2012) is still largely ignorant about basket making and its related activities. I still meet many people who think that the cheap imported baskets they buy in shops are made by machine and very few people can distinguish between native willow and imported cane. Perhaps we need some 'TV basket makers' who can show people not only how easy it is to make something, but who could extol the virtues of indigenous 'ingredients' and 'recipes' and enthuse a whole generation with the magic of cooking up wonderful things with this amazingly versatile and sustainable activity.
I know it isn't easy to grow willows organically, I grow them myself, but it is certainly possible and there are plenty of individuals
and several companies operating in the UK selling
a good range of organic willow that they cultivate
Water Willows in Milton
Keynes is probably the biggest certified organic grower but there are smaller
ones such as
Blencogo and
Barfad in Scotland.
It is still a dust bowl here in France
but maybe it isn’t just the grass that is greener in Scotland.
