Green Willow Weaving With Nick Neddo- WildLife Series - Episode 0

[Music] the wild life stories of humanity's original skills told from the perspective of the people who loved them [Music] it's late autumn in Vermont Brad care and myself are traveling across the state to visit our friend Nick Neto he is an artist a teacher practitioner of the skills since the late 90s he's devoted to so many different skill sets within this world although we're gonna talk a little bit more about green willow basketry he's an ideal person for us to go visit and explore what the show is really about parents coming along for the ride he has been studying these skills for a long time he's both a friend of ours as well as Nick's to Sarah and I the wildlife series is a new adventure a new challenge after ten years of running groups and teaching these skills we now get to combine our passion for teaching filmmaking and travel and offer our perspective to show you the natural world the way that we see it to seek out people practicing and teaching these skills and share their vision of why it's so important in today's world [Music] when I started approaching these skills am I in my vision was to disappear into the wilderness you know wild edible plants is really what got me in to this whole world primitive skills I was trying to learn how to live without spending money that was the idea when I was 16 I figured okay maybe if I if I study this stuff for about a year I'll have it all figured out that's what I thought and then you know wild edibles led to medicinal plants the world expanded from there it became a compass for me I feel fortunate that first of all that I found my way to this pursuit at a young age and that it's remained important to me throughout my life and at one at one hand it's it's kind of a simple thing to make a container that's functional and then on the other hand it's a lifelong pursuit to make it beautiful you know and to explore the the creative possibilities with that I couldn't deny the transformative power that I was experiencing from from learning primitive skills and survival skills and just being with the earth and that on that level I couldn't I couldn't not notice that that's what the world was missing and there's there's something about the look on somebody's face when they've made their first willow basket it's almost like they birthed this thing they're they're always beautiful and they're especially beautiful to the person who made it kind of like a parent to the to a parent their baby is the most beautiful thing in the world even if it's an ugly baby the willow basket goes through this phase for the beginner it can be ugly and then it can be beautiful that you can love it you can hate it but you automatically you come around and you love it again because even if it's not the perfect willow basket it's something that you made and it's something that shows you everything that you've learned along the way it's a documentation of the lessons that you gathered all the little mistakes and all the inconsistencies all the things that went wrong and the things that went right are a map that shows you how to approach your next basket with more insight right and I like to tell my students that this will only be your best willow basket if it's the only one you make there are a lot of resources out there there people like me teaching their books and all sorts of things places where you can learn but I think what's more important is giving yourself permission to goof around with it to make mistakes to experiment go out on the landscape and get to know willow get to know the different kinds of willow bend it play with it understand its growth habits let's pick up the patterns and sort of make these observations about what all willows have in common and weaving a basket you want to have all of your materials prepped and ready to go we're gonna start with making the base here we're going to pick some of our thicker rods and create the slat that we're going to hold together with long pliable rods small large round or oval the initial form of the basket starts here once the base is completed we're going to insert our upright stakes and we're gonna pick them up the next step is the up set where we're gonna give that vertical form to those stakes and security from here on up there are many ways to leave the walls where you can utilize different weaving techniques such as twining Randy or wailing that are all gonna have different effects of light and shadow in the overall context of that basket as you build up the walls of the basket symmetry and form become the focus the final step is completing the rim where we turn down our stakes and weave them into a border tying the basket together over the years have been planting my own willow Holt it's starting to to come into maturity to the untrained eye it looks like nothing special to a trained eye it looks like willow heaven like basketry heaven you'll see large basil root system growth with two or three hundred perfect Weaver's coming out of each one you know when you see that either a beaver has been working very consistently or a basket maker has been painstakingly lovingly tending those willows this is beautiful yeah so this is a willow that I've been working with for years and years the species I started calling it basket willow and turns out that's what a lot of other people call it as well as purple oh sure willow or stream Coelho it is Salix purpurea and it was imported here in colonial days people brought it here to make baskets it's one of about 45 or 50 species that I've introduced to my little willow garden so this is a good example of coppicing this is cut down every year and with this one I've cut it down around knee height and this is what grew last summer it's a single growing season of material and you can see that it's begging to be woven into basket and you can tell it's just really the only willow that will grow with opposite branching pattern as well as alternate all the other willows are alternate branching patterns so this this is like the easiest one to identify one of the things that makes this so good for weaving in addition to how flexible it is is also how long it is and how there isn't much of a variation in diameter from base to tip when I'm harvesting I'm trying to think about the size of the wound that I'm leaving you can see the last year's cuts actually from the spring really the spring and then this is where it all grew this year from this height so next year I might the next time I cut it I might cut it a few inches taller even to be able to leave usable vertical structure for birds and other wildlife is really important instead of removing all of it so for sure a lot of what I harvest I do cut right down to the ground it just straight up koffice them but I mix it in with different management practices so to speak yeah well I think that's like one of the many examples to where people can work with the landscape and have a win-win situation a win for you I went for the willow and for the birds it doesn't have to be an extractive process yeah exactly so thinking about reproduction and how things grow and just the whole dynamic interplay so I mean I'm looking for a productive thriving healthy biodiversity and monoculture is the antithesis of that and anywhere there's water moving through a landscape is gonna offer this amazing opportunity for biodiversity and so I mean along here we've got our boneset patch we have we have bottle gentian which is endangered in Vermont in here and you know so it's impending The Willows for sure and I favor them but then when I notice these other special creatures then I think they you know end up having their own spa and I try to do things to propagate them or favor them the idea for me is to honor the fact that we are materialistic people we live in a material world I've learned to redefine that term for myself and it's okay to be materialistic because that means you actually value and honor the materials yeah and I would I would argue that our culture at large is not materialistic with the opposite we're accused of being materialistic but if we were then we would actually not be so wasteful I think if you're materialistic you're not gonna waste the materials to me this is treasure this is there's a lot of value in this sometimes I wonder if the willow is tricking me into you know by luring me into having having this useful this beautiful material it's luring me to take care of it and ensure that it has a place to live and that's for sure the case with this landscape you know this place is turning into willow world because of my love of basket making yeah it's really being active in the process of making is what makes the basket more valuable to me right and like seeing the material seeing it all woven together knowing where that particular willow was growing remembering the red-tailed hawk that flew over that day when I was cutting the willow remembering the grizzly bear track in Montana when I was cutting the willow for that particular basket you know they hold things but they also hold memories and hold stories I could buy a basket and it's holding the memory of that craft store or you know like it's that's not sacred to me it's not special it's not that the basket isn't important or it's not valuable the port basket it needs to be adopted and given a life with memories and stuff the act of creating you know being a participant in this thing's life in its birthing and then knowing that the place where I harvested the willow is also healthier because of my infatuation with making baskets and I find myself in these remote places and I I'm the only person who's been there for a long time and I go back the next time I'm there and the only person who's been there was me the year before and so one of the most rewarding parts of the whole process of making things basketry and anything else from the landscape all the different primitive skills for me is developing these specific relationships with a specific place as a basket maker the first several years that I was looking for Willa out on the land I was not really participating that much is as a tender or as a as a caretaker on the land I was doing my best but I didn't understand willow well enough to know that I could emulate what the Beavers are doing with the willow and then have a consistent source of basket material year after year to do that you're out on the landscape and you're allowing the landscape to be the teacher and that's when all the magic happens right that's when you have these awesome wildlife encounters and that's when you know patience and persistence pays off [Music] while Brad and Nick are in the studio pan and I are gonna whip up some food for the grip I love cooking by fire and you can make this as simple or as complicated as you have time and energy for Perron busted a hand drill Cole we're gonna simply lay some onions leeks sweet potatoes on some coals they can really take that high heat we're gonna make sure that those potatoes don't burn and rotate them and because we have all these little scraps around we're gonna whip up some tension trays to use both as a platter and as a grill for some venison we brought along really the key thing about this is that you build a good fire structure have means to light it and that you're gonna burn it to produce coals and that's how you're gonna control your heat so that you cook your food in the way that you want to it's a really beautiful way and views a certain sort of smokiness and charm and I don't know anyone who doesn't like to eat potatoes around the fire I just love tension trays for their simplicity all it is is a hoop and some steaks moving vertically and horizontally and it's not complicated it's something that you can teach kids and as adults you can just sort of utilize for convenience if you just need a clean surface to play something but what it does is really clearly illustrate how that over-under action creates tension that creates strength within weaving so I'm just putting a couple of together so that we can put our potatoes and onions on it once they're cooked and our venison once that's cooked and therefore keep any grit off of our food big no-no we're hanging out we're gonna eat once they're all done with the work of the day in every part of the world and every specific culture has a tradition of weaving things we all have ancestors that were living and thriving in the Stone Age in fact the vast majority of each of our ancestors were thriving in the Stone Age and if that weren't true then we just wouldn't be here working with willow baskets and Willow in general primitive technology in general is really for me kind of a gateway or a connection to my lineage personally but also to the human lineage and in a time when I feel like the human family is losing its Center losing its sense of belonging a sense of purpose its context of who we are where we've come from it's important to me and I think it's important for others whether they know it or not to have that bigger picture context I think a lot of people think the human story began at the beginning of civilization which is only the last five percent of the time we've been on the planet as homo sapiens and so knowing that the story is so much deeper and knowing that the problems that we're experiencing in the modern world as far as ecological collapse and social unrest the social injustice these to me are direct consequences of among many things losing our context losing our sense of place and not just a sense of place ecologically and on the planet but our sense of place among our communities you know we are very isolated I think perhaps more than we've been ever on the planet from ourselves our sense of purpose our sense of community our sense of ecological participation on the landscape these are all things that to me you know these are grandiose problems and it seems silly in a way to think that making a basket from sticks is a way to fight that or to address that but to me that's an avenue at least it's the beginning of a conversation or the beginning of a trajectory that addresses who we are right we are creative problem-solving resilient creatures that's the human superpower and when we don't access that when we're not flexing that muscle atrophies we stop asking questions we stop thinking critically we lose the ability to solve problems into ask questions we lose our connection to curiosity and creativity and without that it just seems like our days are numbered on this planet you know we need to be adaptable [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] we're biologically designed to thrive in social groups right to be together stronger together and so you know when we're woven together socially we're a lot stronger as well you know this these fragile things together in context to under tension kind of mutual tension creates something larger and something stronger the right kind of tension weaving started off as the simple thing and now it's to me it's this huge thing that I think will keep me keep me busy for the rest of my life and maybe at the end of it I'll have I'll be satisfied with what I've learned as far as feeling like I've arrived somewhere but probably not well I'll be satisfied that I've been weaving you know I'll weave it at that you know [Laughter] wait you can just buy these I quit we hope you enjoyed join us for our next episode in st. Croix where we visit Matt and Carmen Cordy know of Caribbean earth skills you

Channel: Roots School

Views: 76,930

Keywords: The WildLife Series, Weaving, Willow, willow basketery, willow weaving, green willow, salix, Roots School, Vermont, Nick Neddo

Id: RZvuh0VW3X4

Length: 24min 0sec (1440 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 15 2018