The simplest form of green woodworking is stick furniture. This is literally furniture made from sticks harvested from hedgerows and coppiced woodlands. Stick furniture doesn’t last for ever but then it doesn’t matter if your mood changes and you want to replace it with something else. Just use the old chair for kindling. I’ve seen the same principle applied to an office made out of cardboard. The whole thing takes very little energy to make and is completely recyclable once the client has tired of it. Stick furniture is a lovely addition to any garden and you can book yourself on a day course for not much money (www.bodgers.org.uk, or locally to me Sylvantutch +44 (0) 1654 761614). For slightly more advanced homemade benches you could consider investing in a pole lathe (a footoperated device for turning wood), a set of lathe tools and a book such as Ray Tabor’s Green Woodworking Pattern Book. This contains more than 300 projects, ranging from stick furniture to tool making to gates, fences, hanging baskets, bird tables, compost bins, arbours and trellis. For most of the projects you just need access to a handful of basic hand tools (no power tools are used) and some coppiced wood from a hedgerow or local woodland. If you just fancy having a go at green woodworking, check out local green fairs, festivals or country shows. There’s usually an opportunity to make something simple with a wood lathe. If you live in London get yourself down to the Woodland Wonders Fair at Kew Gardens held every May Bank Holiday, see www.rbgkew.org.uk/events.
Ethical choice: living willow
If you need a throne for your kingdom, how about a living willow chair? Better for the environment because you don’t have to use materials that have been shipped over great distances and processed using machinery powered by fossil fuels. Majestic and alive, like something out of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, living willow chairs carry on growing, providing fresh growth every year for you to trim and use for other willow projects such as basket making. Be careful where you plant it, though. Willow roots are notoriously aggressive and willows drink a lot of water. They’re fast growing and are good for helping to reduce the moisture content in wet soils. They will compete with vegetables so don’t plant too close to your crops. You can also make living willow hedges and arbours. Jon Warnes’s book Living Willow Sculpture is an excellent place to start, as is www.thewillowbank. com. The Willow Bank is run by Steve Pickup, one of the country’s most experienced willow growers and weavers (see below). You can pick up a bundle of willow cuttings ready for planting, a set of instructions to make your own dome and an extra DVD if you need a little bit of visual stimulation.
Buying garden furniture
Buying stuff can be fun too and there are so many nice pieces of beautifully made, sustainable and ethical furniture out there, it’s a shame not to support the suppliers if you’ve got the spare cash. Individually made items tend to be more expensive than the sort of factory-made furniture you can buy in chain stores, but you can guarantee what you’re getting is unique. Agricultural and smallholding shows, green fairs, festivals and other events are always good places to find locally made handcrafted wooden furniture. Websites such as www.allotmentforestry.com, www.coppice-products.co.uk and www.greenwoodcentre.org.uk offer courses and directories of people making and selling handmade wooden furniture.
In Wales the Welsh Timber Forum produce a buyer’s guide to buying (www.welshtimberforum.co.uk). If you go down the mass-produced route always look for the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) symbol (see page 48), but also check whether the finished product has been made in Britain. Sometimes wood is shipped from Scandinavia to China, turned into furniture and shipped back again. This all seems a bit crazy when British-made furniture grown from UK or European wood is available. A UK or European product also gives you certain guarantees about the way the workers are treated. (See also pages 26–29.)
What is the FSC?
The FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) ensures that natural forests are conserved, that endangered species and their habitats are protected, and that forest workers and forest-dependent communities are respected. Unlike other certification schemes, the FSC was set up independent of industry and has broad support from conservation groups, indigenous communities and forest product buyers. It gives equal decision-making rights to economic, social and environmental interests in its governing structure and standard-setting process. It is the preferred standard for gardening organisations such as the RHS and conservation bodies like The World Wide Fund for Nature and the RSPB. At www.fsc-uk.org, their buyer’s guide includes a league table of mainstream retailers who stock FSC furniture. Top (A) ratings (100 per cent of furniture FSC-approved) go to B&Q, Asda, Wyevale, Tesco and Marks & Spencer.
The rainforest in our gardens
Felled timber from rainforests is often mixed with other fibres and hidden in chipboard products or turned into garden fencing. Rainforests are biodiversity hotspots, which means they are wonderfully species rich, and their destruction can lead to the extinction of whole species. There are only 60,000 gorillas left in the world and 5,000 are lost every year as their forest habitats are cleared. At this rate they will be gone within twelve years. We can help by avoiding products that may contain wood from felled rainforests. Always look for the FSC label. The Greenpeace online Garden Furniture Guide is the most comprehensive guide to finding FSC-approved garden furniture products: www.greenpeace.org.uk/forests. Think about contributing to some of the charitable organisations that buy up areas of rainforest to save them from logging (try www.rainforest-alliance.org). Boycotting is more effective if it is backed up with positive action to preserve and protect.
It’s impossible to list all UK manufacturers of ethical garden furniture but here are a few for starters: www.britisheco.com, www.handmadehammocks.co.uk, www.hammocks.co.uk (Fairtrade hammocks from Mexico), www.pendlewood.com. I also liked www.tinglondon.com who make stylish hammocks out of recycled seat belts. If you look at only one website check out www.reelfurniture.co.uk, an imaginative company making entirely handcrafted furniture from old cable reels. Visit www.rd.se and www.purves.co.uk for cardboard seats, www.readymademag.com for plans for a turf sofa, www.salvo.co.uk for salvage merchants, and www.reuze.co.uk, www.marmaxproducts.co.uk and www.theurbangarden.co.uk for information about recycled products; www.ethical-junction.org is a general link to sites for green and ethical products. Enough already!
Shed’s dead
I’ve never been a builder. My knowledge of carpentry is small. My aptitude for construction minimal. At school I got a U at woodwork, despite the fact I skipped PE for two years to take extra lessons. And yet, for some inexplicable reason, I think I’m going to build my own shed. This isn’t a temporary thought: this is a long-held belief, stretching back a decade. One of the reasons I chose the garden I have now is the potential for it to house a shed on stilts. A shed on stilts! As if the task of constructing a shed on flat land wasn’t hard enough. Nevertheless at some point a shed will be built and I will do the building. Why? Because really I want to build a house, and building an eco-shed is the first step.
Why ‘shed’s dead’?
Apart