Why Grow Willow and Cut It Every Year? The Young Rods Are the Point

Willow responds to being cut by producing vigorous straight shoots from the stump, and a plant cut back annually puts its whole growth into a crop of long unbranched rods rather than into a trunk. Those rods are the product. Left alone the plant becomes a tree and the wood is of little use for the purpose, since branched twisted growth cannot be woven. The stump survives for decades and is cut every winter while dormant, so a single planting produces a crop indefinitely, and beds established generations ago are still worked.

The material suited an unusually wide range of uses:

• •Baskets of every size, from shopping to enormous transport hampers
• •Woven hurdles, used as movable fencing for sheep
• •Fish traps, eel traps and lobster pots
• •The frame of a coracle, covered with hide or canvas
• •Bindings for faggots, thatch and hedge laying
• •Garden structures, living fences and, currently, biomass fuel

Turning a cut rod into usable material involves choices that determine the finished appearance. Rods used with the bark on are dried and then soaked before working, and give a brown basket. Rods stripped of bark give a white one, and stripping is easiest in spring when the sap rises, which historically meant standing bundles in water until they began to grow and then pulling the bark off. Boiling the rods before stripping dyes the wood from tannins in the bark and gives a buff colour, which is why buff, white and brown baskets are made from the same plant. Dried rods must be soaked for hours or days before they will bend without cracking.

Weaving with rods is a craft with its own vocabulary and a logic that explains why baskets are shaped as they are. The base is woven flat from crossed rods and then the uprights are staked into it and bent upward, a step called upsetting, which sets the whole shape and is the hardest part to do well. The sides are then woven in bands using several different stroke patterns, each with a different appearance and stiffness, and the choice determines how rigid the basket is. The top is finished with a border that folds the uprights down into each other, locking the structure without any fastening at all.

The crop nearly disappeared and persisted in specific places for specific reasons. Plastic, cardboard and wire replaced almost every traditional use through the twentieth century, and the area under cultivation collapsed. Willow grows best on wet ground that floods, so beds occupied land that was of limited use for anything else, notably the Somerset Levels in England, which is why the industry concentrated there and survives there. Demand persisted for artists' charcoal, for coffins, for garden work and for restoration. And the plant's tolerance of wet ground has since made it valuable again for biomass, for filtering contaminated water and for stabilising riverbanks.

Cutting willow back every winter makes the plant throw its growth into long straight unbranched rods rather than a trunk, and the stump keeps producing for decades. Those rods made baskets, sheep hurdles, fish traps and coracle frames. Bark left on gives brown, stripped gives white and boiling before stripping gives buff, all from the same plant. The crop survived on wet ground nothing else wanted.