Many grit their teeth at a blaze of May dandelions; Suzie Grieve rubs her hands with glee. This is when she goes foraging. “You need to be quick off the mark,” she says, “cutting them just after seeding but before the council mows them down.”
Suzie forages for the fibrous parts of plants and trees that most people would regard as compost fodder, and weaves them into exquisite baskets full of colour, delicacy and light. Around her home in Ulverston, Cumbria, the tangle of midsummer is not chaos but potential weaving materials. “There are plenty of old industrial areas around the town that are overgrown, and these are the best places to find stuff,” she says. “No one’s going to stop you cutting dandelions and brambles.”
After leaving school, she went to live among communities practising sustainable living in France and Spain, learning to turn plant material into something practical and useful. “These are ancient techniques,” she says. “How to weave hurdles to pen in your animals and create cordage (string or rope) to make snares and fishing lines would have been second nature. When I teach people, they often say they feel like they have done it before.”
They look as though they could have been created at any time in the past 5,000 years.
Plants have always intrigued her, and using her large knowledge to create small objects of great beauty has become her obsession. They have a mystery that intrigues her. “The colour of the fibre when it is dried can be completely different from what you expected. I like to work things out; it’s a kind of play, which is a good thing.”
Learning how to harvest, strip and create baskets from willow bark was her first foray into natural fibres, soon moving on to plants such as flag iris, daylilies, clematis, honeysuckle and crocosmias. “My baskets are really nothing complicated, and not as complex as knitting,” she says modestly. There is certainly
a pleasing simplicity that comes from the organic shape and the contrasting colours of the materials. But perhaps part of their charm also lies in their timelessness. They look as though they could have been created at any time in the past 5,000 years.
The process of foraging seems simple but requires constant looking and learning. Her allotment provides an abundance of raw materials. She cuts most things just before they die off in winter, when the stalks still have a bit of flexibility in them, strips the leaves and dries them over many weeks, before soaking them just prior to use, making them pliable enough to weave. She sometimes uses the stripped leaves to create airy and seemingly fragile baskets; half woven scribble, half nest.
Her followers on social media often comment on the hypnotic rhythm of her work. Inevitably, some people comment that she is ‘killing’ a plant when she harvests it, so she patiently explains her sustainable techniques, pointing them to books such as Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. She stresses the importance of not exploiting nature, but working with it, waiting for the right moment to harvest and taking only small amounts.
It is tough making a living from what you love, especially when it requires so much time and patience. Suzie has plans to write a book about natural fibres, to shine a light on her craft, which is both ancient and perfectly in tune with modern environmental and ecological anxieties.
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Follow Suzie on Instagram @foragedfibres and find out more about her work at foragedfibres.co.uk
