Our garden trugs are made by Charlie Groves in East Sussex, who has been making traditional garden trugs using sustainable materials for over ten years. Charlie uses locally coppiced Sweet Chestnut and English Cricket Bat Willow (the same as is used in today’s cricket bats).

The handle and rim are made from the Sweet Chestnut using a cleaving axe or froe, then held in a shaving horse and smoothed with a drawknife before being steamed to make the wood flexible. The boards and feet are prepared from cricket-bat willow, again using the drawknife and shaving horse.

The Sweet Chestnut comes from the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty which is a nationally important landscape protected for its unique character of rolling hills draped with small irregular fields, scattered farmsteads, sunken lanes and abundant woods and hedges. This area boasts the greatest proportion of ancient woodland in the UK, managed for centuries by skilled coppice workers.
Coppice is woodland where the trees are cut periodically, and are left to regrow from the cut stumps, known as stools. Coppice woodland is an important habitat because many British flowering plants, mammals and insects thrive under the coppice management system and many rarer species are now only found in working coppice.