Living Willow Wales
Living Willow Wales creates living willow structures and sculptures for schools, organisations and the general public. We are also suppliers of cuttings and rods for DIY sculptures and weaving. If you are in West Wales we can come out and help you build your structure or run it as a workshop for children and adults.
One of the off-shoots from the willow structures has been providing schools with advice and practical help on creating wildlife gardens. One of the ways we do this is by providing suitable habitats for different types of wildlife. The Bug Hotel below (aka Insect Palace or Wildlife Habitat Stack if you want to be formal) is a really fun one day workshop for the children and a great way to turn all those bits and pieces left over from DIY projects into a real work of art.
Please contact us on Lampeter (01570) 421360 or email us at "info at livingwillowwales dot co dot uk" (replace at and dot and remove spaces) if there is any way that we can help.
Hope to hear from you soon.
Andrew & Lisa
LATEST NEWS (also detailed on Andrew Roberts' blog):
February 11th 2009 - Giant Living Willow Fish
After the very unfriendly willow planting weather that has compressed the entire planting season into four very busy weeks, we're finally away. We've just finished our largest structure to date, a 400 square foot willow maze of tunnels in the shape of a giant fish or sea serpent. We've also completed a large dome at Ysgol Mydroilyn and a smaller dome with tunnels at Ysgol Mynach.
More images can be seen here.
Willow Hearts - I've also made a foray into dead willow sculptures with this willow heart.
November 14th 2009 - Living Willow Maintenance
The willow will be dormant soon, so I've put together a list of maintenance tasks to keep your structure looking tip-top and not reverting to becoming a small grove of willow trees!
You can download the list as a word document or PDF by clicking on the appropriate link:
Living Willow Maintenance - Task List - Microsoft Word 2003
Living Willow Maintenance - Task List - PDF
October 10th 2009 - Organics Apple Day
We'll be having our first ever willow based stall at Organics Apple Day on Saturday Oct 10th at 11am until 3am.
From the Organics site:
"It’s apple and pear time of the year. In our shop we are now selling a wide range of UK produced apples and pears. To celebrate this year's apple harvest, in conjunction with the local Permaculture Group we are organising an APPLE DAY. This year it will be held on 10th October at our shop in Lampeter, from 11am to 3pm. A local apple and tree specialist will be attending and we aim to have a range of local products and producers to help us celebrate. Hope you can join us."
Our Account of the day: Living Willow Wales (me and Lisa) did our first willow stall back on Oct 10th 2009 at the Lampeter Apple Day, and lots of fun it was too! Getting everything together was hard work but it seemed to be appreciated. And we even had enough space to put up all of the willow letters we had made. I was a little worried about this as although planned to be smaller our letters ended up each being about a foot high. We put on a little mini workshop for the children by bringing along a couple of Rose’s small table and chairs and providing paper, charcoal pencils (willow of course), willow rods and various willow shapes to copy. Rose did get a little territorial at one point and excluded all other children from the stall by building a barricade of chairs – she’s such a sales women! Several children where running around with willow wands (a simple willow star shape) by the end of the day. We also brought along samples of eachof the different kind of willow that we grow. We’re mainly using and selling the fast-growing structural willow (Viminalis and a viminalis x triandra) at the moment but are building up our stocks of various ornamental and basketery willow. The Salix Ethroflexuosa being the most visually impressive, being corkscrewed and bright red. We had lots of interest in the photos we’ve got of some of the amazing things people have done with willow especially Marcel Kalberer. I wouldn’t say we’ve done anything truly amazing yet, but I’m quite excited about the 40ft space ship we’ve got planned this winter!
As well as us, and apart from the appley things going on (people could bring there apples for pressing), Gary was there with his Maesyffin Mushrooms - loved the pate; a local shoe maker; a miller with flour created using one of the few genuine water mills still in operation; Transistion Lambed; and a couple of other stalls I didn’t get chance to look at.
So with the great weather, all in all a great day out.
June 1st 2009 - Ysgol Pontrhydfendigaid Bug Hotel
This is a bug hotel we had a lot of fun building, on a glorious day last week at Ysgol Pontrhydfendigaid.
There are more photos here. And you can also download instructions for making a bug palace.
March 21st 2009 - Ysgol Llanwenog Willow Play Area and "Living Classroom"
We had a fantastic turn out of parents and children on the Saturday we spent creating this structure; the head teacher had done a great job of rallying support for the day. It felt like a real summer party atmosphere with people picnicing around the site in the sunshine and the children playing around the partially completed structure. All we needed was the smoke of a BBQ to finish off the scene. It was very strange planting willow on such a sunny day, you could tell the planting season was coming to the end (it sounds like we're always out working in the sun but you can bet the rain will be lashing down when we harvest in January). Having so many people made very light work of getting the 500 rods in the ground and tying the 1000 or so knots that were needed to hold it all together. Along with the school we designed the structure to fit in a narrow strip alongside the sports field. We'd put a low children's entrance leading into a small tunneled maze and a larger adults entrance at the other end. Both led into a 10' dome that could be used as a living classroom.
There are more photos here.
March 19th 2009 - Ysgol Cilcennin Willow Play Area and "Living Classroom"
The caption reads "Some members of Ysgol Cilcennin in their new "Willow Dome". The children helped build the dome, and once fitted with curved benches will serve as play area and fair-weather classroom".
One of our structures, that we built with a workshop at Ysgol Cilcennin, was recently featured in the Cambrain News.
There are more photos here.
