We are a small willow crafts business set in the beautiful Chiltern Hills AONB in South Oxfordshire.
We make a wide range of bespoke willow products for the home and garden using traditional skills with an emphasis on contemporary living.
We also run a range of craft courses , great for up-skilling, imensely rewarding, and better still, you get to take your beautiful creation home. From bent stick chairs to woven plant supports, there’ll be a course to suit you!
We grow and harvest the majority of our willow from numerous sites including an acre near the banks of the River Thames on the Hardwick Estate where we are based.
Please take your time to look at what we offer and support the ongoing resurgence in traditional 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
The Team
Dave ‘the stick’ Jackson
Dave started his career in coppice crafts in 1998 when looking for a new direction in life. He started volunteering for a conservation charity as a volunteer officer, and being responsible for a group of volunteers he received coppicing and hedgelaying training in return. In 1999 he started the business Wildwood Coppice Crafts. Soon after he was asked by a local special needs school if he would start a weekly woodland craft day for a regular group of kids. 5 years later this had become almost a full time job, teaching basic greenwood and woodland craft qualifications to students from 4 different PRU units. The teaching was a fantastic accelerated form of learning, as anything he wanted to learn how to make, he could make with the kids.
Dave left teaching around 2005 and focused on the making of coppice products and running courses for adults. A couple of years later he obtained funding from the Malvern Hills AONB to set up the Malvern Hills Coppice Network. This put him under the radar of the Small Woods Association who were looking for placements for Coppice Apprentices. Dave hosted an apprentice for 3 years which helped his business develop further.
There were now moves nationally for the reformation of a national coppice organisation. As chair of the Malvern Hills Coppice Network, Dave was asked to sit on the steering committee for the formation of a new national body. In 2013 the new National Coppice Federation was born and Dave organised it’s inaugural meeting in the Malvern Hills in April of that year.
Dave served as a founding NCFed Director for Worcestershire for 3 years with responsibility for developing the website.
After 19 years in the Malvern Hills, Dave upped sticks and moved his business to The Chiltern Hills in 2018 and relaunched the business under the name of The Stick Smith.
Maria Jenkins
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Kristen Park
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