Sarah Loughlin, who runs Hopewood Baskets together with Marcus Wootton, feels similarly in tune with the seasons and her heritage. The pair work from a garden studio at their home close to the Wyre Forest in Worcester, UK, where their work has a rich history. “As a craft, basketry is older than ceramics. One of the first things humans would have made is baskets to hold things in,” says Loughlin, whose designs include a foraging basket, forged from willow in a French randing pattern, designed to stow away precious cargo from woodland or hedgerow excursions.

 At one time people would have made particular baskets to contain specific finds, from apples to potatoes; fish baskets came in different sizes to reflect the different weights; there was even a duck nesting basket. 

Loughlin, who originally trained as a Montessori teacher, gathers hazelwood from the local oak and birch forests to make her baskets, and these wild finds have become an intrinsic part of what is an all-encompassing, slow-spun endeavour. “I get totally lost for hours in the hunt for the perfect stick,” she says. Working with willow, much of which comes from a local coppice, Loughlin is also increasingly hands-on with the harvesting, deliberately incorporating the incisions from the hand-cut crop as part of the basket’s story.

For Loughlin, there’s a sense of pure wonder in her craft. “I’m always amazed by the fact that you can start with a pile of sticks, and with only a knife you can end up with something useful and beautiful that holds and protects things” she says. 

Few weavers are more deeply committed to the ancient rituals of their craft and its links to the land than Felicity Irons. One of the last remaining practitioners in Europe, Irons is a self-taught rush weaver who established her workshop, Rush Matters, in the 1990s. When her local Cambridgeshire rush cutter died, his brother encouraged Irons to take on the practice. “He gave me a two-hour lesson in rush cutting and that was that,” she says. “I’d never been on a river before – it was terrifying – but I was immediately hooked.” 

Irons soon realised that the English rush market was dominated by the Dutch rush, so she took on extra helpers and began distributing her crop more widely. Decades on, once a year, typically in late June, Irons heads onto the River Nene and along the River Ouse in her punt, to harvest rush.

Cut by hand with a three-ft scythe, their daily haul of some two-tonnes of rush is tied into bundles, then lined up along the hedgerow outside her workshop in a 14th-century barn to dry for anything up to ten days. “When we’re on the non-navigable parts of the river where there are no people it’s very special” she says. “There are kingfishers and mayflies, moorhens, swans with their cygnets, and the occasional otter.”

Irons is continuing an East Anglian tradition that dates to the 1700s, only falling out of fashion after the Second World War. Her rush flooring and tableware is beloved by everyone from Jasper Conran to The National Trust and the Metropolitan Museum.

“I love that this humble plant that no one notices on the river can become this practical object that sits in both ordinary and extraordinary homes all over the world” she says. “Bulrush has its own inherent beauty.” 

And while we can't all live in remote places, the pieces these modern artisans produce bring a little part of their inner peace into our homes around the world.