I’m just back from my week visiting Christiane in Austria. She lives in a small town in one of the national parks, a beautiful place ringed by majestic snow-capped mountains. As a woodworker, I’m always looking around me at trees and timber which in Austria make a wonderful sight. Almost all the houses are heated by a large tiled woodburner, no village is complete without a firewood merchant and everywhere are neatly stacked lengths of split hardwood. Equally impressive are the sawmills; on my first visit I could hardly believe the size of the timber yards with piles of logs 30ft or more high which took 10, 15 or even 20 seconds to pass by on the train.
All this comes from the well-managed forests, some of which we walked through during my stay. Beech, ash, birch and spruce dominate, all gun barrel straight and enough to make this green wood worker drool: cast your eye to any stand or firewood pile and there’s beautiful material for chairs, bowl carving, rakes, polelathe turning and anything else you can name.
Some of the reason for this is obviously the excellent management of this valuable resource but some is also probably in the numbers; the UK is two and a half times more densely populated than Austria which has a whopping 47% compared with the UK’s 12%.
Wonderful as it all sounds, I did feel there was something a little too managed and orderly about the woodland I saw – there was very little diversity of age or species in the stands and hardly any layer structure with smaller, scrub-like cover under the standards or ground flora. In short, not as messy as woodland in the UK; a reflection of our national characters?
As well as being relaxing, folding the small units for origami kusudama is addictive and it’s taken no time at all to fold these 120 pieces for the ‘epcot ball’. There’s still 15 to do but plenty of time when each one now takes just 90 secs.
Walter Lloyd is a well-known figure in the South Lakes. A bow-top caravan builder, charcoal burner, fell-pony breeder and honorary chairman of the Coppice Association (NW), he can often be found demonstrating hay or straw rope making at shows around the county and entertaining folk with his tales. A couple of weeks ago I was asking him if there would be any suitable rods in his willow beds for making rake handles (‘stails’). During the conversation I realised that the cutting had gotten a bit overgrown and Walter could use a hand with this year’s harvest. So this weekend, on a beautiful day that felt like spring was truly here, a dozen folk made up of coppice workers, basket makers, woodworkers and others met at Walter’s place near Newby Bridge to work together.
We concentrated our efforts on the most overgrown section which will mostly end up fueling Walter’s bow top woodburner but also yielded yurt poles, rods for riverbank spiling work, some basket materials, willow setts for planting and my raw stails.
Most of the kusudama I’ve made so far consist of 30 units joined in a pattern of hexagons and triangles to form a dodecahedron (12-sided shape). You can see the hexagons and triangles in this model, “electra” which was designed by UK folder David Mitchell.
Today I feel very proud to have been a tiny part of the campaign to stop our government from selling off more of our national assets.
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