Lorraine Ellery Matthews
speaker
36 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard Aug 2024
Lorraine Ellery Matthews’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
My name's Lorraine Ellery Matthews and our business is called Hedges and Hurdles, Country Skills and Crafts.
We can see quite far ahead into the distance here and it's a beautiful day today. We've got some lovely blue skies. We can see the hills of the North Downs. We can see farmland reaching quite far ahead of us. We're just surrounded by green trees.
We're on the Tarrington estate, which is a huge site, but the tenant farmers nearby, in fact, my neighbour tenant farmer, informed me that this was actually where his grandmother used to keep the pigs. And you can see that because we've got a walled garden area as well as quite a large barn area.
We've got some gorgeous colours here, particularly that big pile of willow leaning against the wall here.
It is.
It looks so fiery, doesn't it? And this particular willow is just a common willow that's been grown locally, in fact, just five minutes up the road. in somebody's garden that contacted me last year and informed me they had this willow and they knew that I created lots of plant supports with common willow like this, a sort of a Vimalaris, you should say.
Yes, and we call it a curly willow. This is from our tree in our own garden. And we pollard it and use this gorgeous curly willow for decorative purposes. So it's great in our Christmas wreaths. And at this time of year, people are using it in the trellises that we make.
So over to the right here in this very long trough, I've stood all different types of willow. There's three different stages of willow. So you have green willow, which is freshly cut, which is what we've just looked at here. And we have semi-green where the saps come out of the willow. It's still supple, still able to weave with it. And then we have brown willow.
And these are the brown willow bundles that I buy in from the Somerset Plains. So this is a cultivated willow. It's what... specialist basket weavers use for weaving because I also do basket willow crafts. I make sculptures like the duck for example.
Well actually this particular duck is life-size because it's based on a Cayuga duck which is an effervescent colour duck which we have on the Burley Estate where I also have another studio. Fantastic.
Yeah, this is a pheasant. So I was going to run a duck workshop for a group, and they said that they were very much into pheasant shooting, and they bred pheasants. So they said, can we make pheasants? And we did.
It's a very popular one, particularly with our hen parties. It's something that can be done in a couple of hours and you can continually build on it and you can also plant it up as well.
We don't really use string. The only time we use any other materials is probably for our obelisks just to secure the tops. We use like a wire tie. But for the hearts, we're just using willow. So in that bucket over there, you can see I've got some green willow. And this is what we've been using to create the knots on the peony cloche. And this is actually a living willow.
So I wouldn't use living willow for basket making because baskets shrink if you use living willow. But for these peony cloches... You can benefit from the colour, which is really nice.
So that's using birch. And actually that very large heart, it was more for a wedding fair, in fact. And that's actually made onto a soft steel frame.
This is the plant equivalent. Yeah, yeah. We call it a peony cloche because it was designed to support peonies, for peonies to go through it. It's the perfect height and diameter and shape. And in fact, if you look down in it, I think it looks very tulip-like. It's very architectural.
And back to what I was saying before, with the living willow, I'm using this to create the knots to hold certain areas of the design together. In fact, that's called a god's eye, so it's a specific weave. that's used just to secure something in place.
So we also have the very large obelisk, but we also have something similar, which is a cylindrical support for those plants, the tall ones, to then hang over the sides. So the obelisk here, gosh, how tall would you say that is?
And the willow's probably been slightly trimmed as well. So people have choices to the height. They have to measure how much room they've got in their car or on their car, obviously, before they make a decision. But they can always trim down these tapered ends.
No, I mean, they're very architectural, but they do look lovely with sweet peas, clematis, even your runner beans and French beans growing up them. And I use them for that purpose in my own garden.
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