Willow weaving workshop

On 1st of December the Royal Parks gardeners plus some of the Queen's Orchard volunteers attended  a Willow weaving workshop hosted by James Buchanan.

The "mission of the day" was pruning and tiding up the willow tunnels James created in the playground area of Greenwich Park two years ago.

Working with alive plants means to control and check their growth in a way that supports and strengthens the structure every once in awhile.

Autumn or winter are the best periods for pruning and arranging the new shoots to tidy up the shape of a living willow tunnel because the plants are dormant and removing the tip branches does not encourage the growth of other shoots until the following Spring.

As the willow has quite flexible branches and relatively thin, the weaving requires bending the young shoots among the pre-existent structure and tying them to the other branches avoiding to break them.

In order to strengthen the structure, the pruned hazel branches are weaved within the existing willow branches or as a base for the fences.

Despite the chilly weather, it was actually a very engaging bright day. A big thank you to all the people attended the workshop and especially to James Buchanan for sharing his experience and knowledge with us.

The gate

If you have walked by the Queen's Orchard just once, you would probably remember the gorgeous piece of art at the entrance: the gate.

Even now, during the winter time, when the orchard is closed to the public, the black silhouettes forged on the steel layout are an eye-catching feature for visitors coming along the north-eastern entrance of the park, and a very distinctive symbol that we are proud to have as logo for this blog.

A couple of deers, an apple tree, birds, flowers, and mulberry leaves are all natural subjects strictly connected with the Orchard, its history and plant species, and the Greenwich Park as well.

A very distinctive design created by local artist Heather Burrell along with Friends of Greenwich Park, based on pupils' drawings from The John Roan Secondary and Meridian Primary Schools in 2009. She also created the floral shaped well covering inside the entrance you can see in the following picture.

We had the opportunity to meet Heather Burrell at her studio in Deptford last month: she is one of the resident artists at Art in Perpetuity Trust near Deptford Creek and she work with metals designing organic shapes and natural elements for public space and community projects.

During the visit we were given a sneak peek of some new pieces Heather is working on, in particular the "Lungs" made of tree branches, as a strict connection between human and nature, the studio wall panel made out of Acer leaves, and other work in progress projects.

She also showed us the new mulberry leaves that would be replacing the missing ones on the Queen's Orchard gate that have been vandalised sadly.

We hope to see the new leaves and the gate at its best soon and we'd like to say thank you to Heather and her helper for the kind hospitality.

You can visit Heather Burrell's website here: www.heatherburrell.co.uk