Plants for basket weaving.
Baskets are the oldest container we have and they are made of plants, every one of them. Before pottery, before metal, people were already weaving grass and bark and split root into things that carried other things, and the same plants are still the best ones for it.
This page is about the material rather than the technique: which plants give which kind of basket, what you can grow yourself, what has to be gathered or bought, and how each one behaves once it is wet. Basketry is one of the few crafts where the plant decides most of the design.
It is also genuinely slow to learn. The first basket anybody makes is lopsided and too loose, and the reason is almost always that the material was too dry. Nobody is quick at this in the first year.
Growing your own willow
Basket willow is grown as a coppice: you plant cuttings, cut everything back to a low stool, and from then on it throws up straight one-year rods every winter. A bed of thirty plants in a damp corner will keep a hobby weaver supplied indefinitely, and the stools go on producing for decades. Rods are cut when the leaves are off, sorted by length, and either used green or dried and re-soaked. Salix viminalis and S. triandra are the classic basket varieties; the ornamental willows with coloured bark weave too but tend to be shorter and more brittle.
Rattan and cane
Rattan is a climbing palm, not a wood, and it is the one basket material most people meet without knowing what it is. Split and processed, it comes as round reed for stakes and weavers, flat reed for plaited work, and chair cane for seat weaving. It has to be soaked before use - ten minutes for fine cane, longer for thick round reed - and it goes brittle again as it dries, which is why traditional workshops keep a tub of water on the go all day. Imported rather than grown in temperate gardens, but forgiving to learn on.
Reed, rush and cattail
Wetland plants give the soft, flat materials: common reed for coarse work, soft rush for the twisted cords of rush seating, and cattail leaves for the smooth, pale plaited baskets found across most of the world. All three are cut in late summer, dried properly under cover for weeks, then dampened again before weaving - green material shrinks as it dries and leaves a slack basket. Cattail in particular wants slow drying out of the sun, or it turns brown and loses its strength.
Pine-needle coiling
Long-needled pines - longleaf, ponderosa, some of the Mediterranean species - drop needles in bundles that can be coiled into a rope and stitched into a basket with thread or raffia. It is the cheapest way into basketry: the material is free off the ground, needs only a rinse and a soak, and the technique is a single repeated stitch. The results are fine, light and surprisingly strong, and the craft has a long history in the American south and around the Mediterranean.
Straw work and lipwork
Wheat, rye and oat straw were the material of the corn dolly, the straw hat and the lipwork beehive - the domed skep. Straw for craft needs to come from tall old varieties harvested before full ripeness; modern short-strawed cereals are useless for it. Bundles are soaked, then either plaited flat for hats and braids or bound into a coil with split bramble for skeps and baskets. Growing a small patch of an heirloom wheat is the usual way people get proper straw now.
Coiling, twining, plaiting
Almost every basket in the world is one of three things. Coiling wraps a bundle of soft material into a spiral and stitches each round to the last - pine needle and straw work. Twining sets up rigid stakes and twists pairs of weavers around them, which is how most willow and reed baskets are built. Plaiting crosses flat strips over and under with no separate stake and weaver, the technique behind cattail mats and flat splint baskets. Recognising which one you are looking at tells you most of what you need to know about how a basket was made.