We are a small willow crafts business based on the Hardwick Trust Estate in the beautiful Chiltern Hills AONB in South Oxfordshire.
We make a wide range of bespoke willow garden products & in-situ features to beautify your garden. Everything in made to order, tailored to your wants & needs. We can design the project ourselves to your brief or work with your chosen garden designer or architect.
We also make a range of stunning willow chairs suitable for the covered outdoor space or your home, as well as attractive willow baskets.
We offer a selection of craft courses for those who like to get their hands stuck in. Great for up-skilling, immensely rewarding, and better still, you get to take your beautiful creations home. From gypsy willow chairs, woven plant supports and basketry, there’ll be a course to suit you!
We harvest the majority of our willow from numerous sites including an acre near the banks of the River Thames on the Hardwick Trust Estate where we are establishing our own organically grown willow beds.
Please take your time to look at what we offer and support the ongoing resurgence in rural skills. If there is something in particular you would like to commission, please let us know. If it’s made from sticks we’ll have a go – probably!
Thank you
Dave Jackson, The Stick Smith
Meet the Team
Dave Jackson
Dave started his weaving career in 1998 when looking for a new direction in life. Having started out volunteering for a conservation charity in the Malvern Hills overseeing coppicing work, he quickly realised he’d found his vocation. In 1999 he set up his business, establishing himself early on as rural craft teacher for local special needs schools. This rapidly developed into an almost full time job, teaching practical greenwood and woodland craft qualifications to students from 4 different PRU units. The teaching was a fantastic accelerated form of learning for Dave, whilst offering a very therapeutic & natural learning environment for some very challenging but deserving kids.
Dave left teaching around 2005 to focus on his own journey in the world of sticks, making a wide range of willow & coppice craft products. Soon after Dave hosted a Coppice Craft Apprentice for 3 years which helped his business develop further. This experience gave him the confidence to employ full time a local young lad to help with the ever increasing work load.
Away from crafting, there were now moves for the formation of a national coppice organisation. Having previously set up the Malvern Hills Coppice Network, Dave was asked to sit on the steering committee which led to the creation of the National Coppice Federation (NCFed) in 2013. Dave became a founding Director of NCFed, serving for about 10 years, the last 5 of which he was Chair.
In 2018, Dave ‘upped sticks’ and moved his business to the Hardwick Trust Estate in the beautiful Chiltern Hills. The business has streamlined and blossomed with willow craft becoming the main focus, in part due to a lack of available hazel coppice in the beechwoods of the Chilterns.
He now lives on a 1904 Dutch Barge with his partner Maria and three cats, surrounded by the rural idyll which is The Hardwick Trust Estate and the River Thames, on the banks of which he now grows his own willow following organic principles.
Maria Jenkins
Courses admin, website, brainstorming support & general workhorse and full-time Organic Vegetable Grower!
Kristen Park
Assistant project weaver and basket maker.