• Hedgelaying North American Style with Dr Johann Schoepf (1783)

    Hedgelaying North American Style with Dr Johann Schoepf (1783)

    ” Hedgelayers do it in style!” may sound like an amusing bumper-sticker but it refers to one of the most fascinating features of this rural skill: that local differences exist in hedgerow management, called by the National Hedgelaying Society Regional Styles. There are more than 30 styles recorded in the UK, with more in Europe,…

  • A Plum Eater and the first jar of Mount Wolfe Spoon Butter

    I’ve just finished this plum eating spoon which I’m please with. I’m getting to grips with the synergies between understanding the wood, form (what shapes and lines come together to make a spoon), working with tools (sharpness and hold) and the unknowable element I am happy to call ‘magic’! As is often the case, the…

  • Crafting Sustainability: Counter-culture Movements and Sustainable Development Goals

    Crafting Sustainability: Counter-culture Movements and Sustainable Development Goals

    In my blog posts Spooncarving- a ‘gateway drug’ to pro-environmental behaviour and landscape advocacy? and Craft is good for your Health I have been exploring the connections between practising crafts and skills and the benefits for both individuals and society. Their have been a few social movements that have recognised the power of craft beyond its utility, and I…

  • Trusting the Process and letting things Emerge in the Dog Days of Summer

    Magpie and I have just returned from the vet in Cheltenham, Ontario, to see how his his foot is getting on after a run-in with a car in the drive way. There remains only a quarter-moon sliver of rawness now where before there was what seemed to be a Grand Canyon of spilt flesh and…

  • The Certainty Merchants

    In the past year or so I have been undergoing a transition in my thinking and practice away from conservation ecology into a more socio-ecological position. there are no wildlife problems after all,only human ones right? Ive always been interested in systems thinking and complexity ever since reading Fritjof Kapra’s Web of Life, but I’m…