Sunday Read: Wild Basketry by Ruby Taylor
Ruby Taylor’s new book ' Wild Basketry: Making baskets and natural cordage from foraged plants' doesn’t begin with reeds or rushes, but with bird nests. Not the tidy, rounded cocoons of storybooks, but the intricate, ingenious structures built twig by twig by our feathered neighbours - evidence, she suggests, that humans didn’t invent basketry so much as joined an ancient, ongoing dialogue with the natural world.
Wild Basketry reads like field notes from someone who has spent thirty years listening to that dialogue with quiet attentiveness. Taylor, who works under the name Native Hands, has built a life and community around turning roadside weeds into beautifully functional forms. Her Sussex workshops attract those craving the grounding joy of making something real - something that doesn’t buzz, ping, or glow.
Ruby Taylor, foraging in the forest for basketry material. From Wild Basketry by Ruby Taylor.
But this is no exercise in rustic fantasy. With a degree in 3-Dimensional Craft, teacher training, and a background in archaeological education, Taylor approaches basketry as both skilled craft and cultural archaeology. She has helped reconstruct prehistoric dwellings, taught ancient technologies in museums, and spent years studying how humans have worked with wild fibres since long before recorded history.
Netted bags. Left to right: phormium, rush, dandelion, phormium. From Wild Basketry by Ruby Taylor.
The book moves through the seasons like a botanical almanac. In spring, daffodils become cordage - surprisingly strong string from a familiar bloom. Summer brings bramble baskets, transforming a tenacious hedgerow plant into an object of quiet elegance. Autumn sees coiled grass spiralling like DNA; winter offers willow bark, peeled like giant carrots and coaxed into containers.
Extract from the Reed Mace Basket tutorial, featured in Wild Basketry by Ruby Taylor.
There are seven projects in total, suitable for both beginners and those looking to expand their skills. Taylor guides you through each one with calm clarity, introducing a range of techniques and encouraging deeper exploration. Guidance on plant harvesting, fibre processing, and sustainable foraging practices runs throughout, alongside spotlights on contemporary artists working sculpturally with plant materials.
Taylor writes with a tone that’s both clear-eyed and quietly amused. She assumes your curiosity, but not your experience, and her guidance is as generous as it is precise. She explains not only how to make, but how to choose plants thoughtfully - when to gather them, how to process them, and how to harvest without harming the ecosystems that depend on them. There’s joy here, but it’s rooted in attentiveness, not escapism.
Martin Hill & Philippa Jones: Kanuka Circle, Lake Wanaka, New Zealand. Featured in Wild Basketry by Ruby Taylor.
Some of the book’s most captivating moments lie in the artist profiles: makers who use living materials to create works that grow, change, and decay. Taylor frames them as basketry’s evolution - containers not just for objects, but for ideas.
At a time when many craft books promise transformation through aesthetics, Wild Basketry offers something both grounded and generous. Taylor proposes that transformation begins not with buying new things, but with noticing what’s already underfoot. Her weeds are not invaders but teachers, and her baskets are gentle arguments for a different way of being: more attentive, more connected, more alive to the possibilities hidden in plain sight. “A place becomes a home when it sustains you,” she quotes Robin Wall Kimmerer. Taylor’s baskets - woven from plants that most people pass without seeing - suggest that perhaps, with the right kind of attention, we might rediscover how to be at home in the world.
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Further Information:
Available Now: Wild Basketry: Making baskets and natural cordage from foraged plants, by Ruby Taylor.
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Image Credits:
Lead: A variety of baskets made from grass, rush and wild rose, bramble, iris and honeysuckle, willow bark, ivy, pine needles and bindweed. From Wild Basketry by Ruby Taylor.
All other images as credited in captions.