Crafts from the garden.
A garden is not only a place to look at. Almost everything people carried, wore, dyed, scented or stored their food in used to start as a plant in the ground, and a surprising number of those crafts are still practised - not as reenactment, but because the plant version works. This is the hub for all of it: the ones you grow the material for, and the ones you can start with what is already on the windowsill.
Some of these are patient crafts. A willow bed takes a season before it gives you rods, gourds want six months of curing, and madder root is a three-year wait. We have tried to be honest about that on every page rather than pretend any of it is a quick afternoon.
🧶 Crafts by material
Basketry & weaving
Willow, rattan, reed, pine needles and straw - the plants that become containers. What to grow, what to gather, and how the three main weaving techniques differ.
Growing & crafting gourds
Hard-shelled gourds are a crop you grow for the shell, not the flesh. Varieties, the long slow cure, and what people make once the skin has gone hard.
Dried flowers & everlastings
The flowers that keep their colour after cutting, the two ways of drying them, and what to do with a full drying rack in November.
Home scent crafts
Lavender wands, potpourri with a proper fixative, herb wreaths and clove pomanders - the scent of a house before anything came in a bottle.
🎨 Already on the site
Plant crafts: dye & build
The dye garden - indigo, madder, weld, walnut, avocado - and the plants people build with: bamboo, willow, flax, cork, reed.
Everyday plant uses
Eight categories of practical, around-the-home plant use: skin, hair, cleaning, scent, oils and garden helpers.
Plant projects (DIY)
Terrariums, kokedama, moss poles, propagation stations, living walls and pressed flowers - weekend builds with a plant at the centre.