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From cradle to grave: willows and basketmaking in Somerset |
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Harvest time
Artwork inspired by Somerset willow, by local artist Kate Lynch
© Kate Lynch |
Willows were, and still are, planted in willow beds, some 16,000 plants to an acre, each bed lasting between 30 and 40 years. Each willow sends up shoots two to three metres tall. Harvesting begins in October when the last leaves have fallen from the stems and continues through the bleak, wet, winter months until April. Harvesting was once back-breaking work with a hand-hook used well into living memory, and many local willow-growing families remember punting the cut willows out from the soggy moors in flat-bottomed boats along the wide drainage ditches, known as “rhines”.
Traditional basketmakers need to work with stripped willow - willow stems peeled of their bark - and, until the willow stripping machine arrived between the two world wars, willow stripping was entirely done by hand, with each stem pulled individually through a hand-brake, mostly by women and children.
“Child labour”
Stripping white willow by women at the turn of the century at Knapp, North Curry
© The North Curry Society |
Dried harvested willows were boiled in gigantic tanks of water to soften their bark for peeling, but fresh willows cut in May could be peeled raw. Until the 1920s, pupils in Stoke St Gregory had their summer holiday for a month in May so the children could strip the willows in the Whitening Season (for raw peeled willows are white, whereas boiling stains the inner wood a ginger “buff” colour). Local basketmaker, Eddie Barnard, still remembers having to peel willow by hand in the 1950s: “My two aunties were basketmakers. We had to come home from school and strip a few withies before we could go out to play. We used to get paid for it, it was about two bob a bundle at the time”.
Words: Kate Lynch
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