Mallinson Ltd - woodwork courses in Dorset. Perfect short breaks for everyone.

As regular readers will know, this newsletter is the place where we release new dates, new courses and special offers. Subscribing means you will always be the first to know - for example about the 2011 dates I mention below. In between newsletters, don't forget that you can also keep up to date with what we're up to via: Facebook, Twitter and our blog.

And The Winner Is ...

It's come around already! I'm not quite sure where the year's gone but yes, once again it's time to choose the winner of our 'win a free course' picture competition.

Firstly, I must thank everyone for sending in so many pictures this year, they have been invaluable for use on our guests' galleries and elsewhere too. I'm very grateful.

It is always great fun to see the variety of pictures and it is a hard decision to make, but for this year's winner we have gone for a mixture of arty and serenity. This was a last minute entry by a guest on last week's Primitive Pottery course, Julia Hollis. Well done! You are the winner for your beautifully simple black and white picture of Karen Hansen's totem pole. Just give me a call and let me know which two-day course you would like to come on.

Any pictures that come in now will be entered into next year's competition (it seems to have established itself as an annual thing) so do please keep sending them.

New Year/New Dates -
You Heard It Here First

There are still plenty of courses with spaces on during 2010 but with some already selling out, I've decided to release a few of the 2011 dates earlier than I have in previous years. In detail:

2011

Apr Mo/Tu 25th/26th Spoon Carving
May Tu/We 3rd/4th Making A Chestnut Garden Gate
May Th/Fr 5th/6th Carving A Wooden Bowl
May Mo/Tu 9th/10th Pole Lathe & Green Woodworking
May Th/Fr 12th/13th Totem Pole Carving
May Mo-Fr 16th-20th Masterclass - Make A Chair From A Tree
May Th/Fr 26th/27th Carving A Wooden Bowl
June Th/Fr 2nd/3rd Pole Lathe & Green Woodworking
June Mo/We 6th-8th Coracle Making.

The Nettle Pickers

Last month I mentioned that there's a new team preparing food in the woods. Now's the time to introduce them properly. Vicky, Joy and Anna (collectively known as 'The Nettle Pickers') have taken over the new dining tent and are producing fantastic lunches for all courses and events.

The food is such an integral part of the courses that I have been searching high and low for someone who could provide something memorable for our guests. The Nettle Pickers have risen to the challenge and then some. All of our guests this year have enjoyed watching meals being cooked in the woods throughout the mornings, before each day's lunch extravaganza. The ingredients are all local and fresh and include lots of seasonal foraged elements too. When possible organic is preferred and mixed with spices from around the world.

The Nettle Pickers are part of our local farming and smallholding community and are perfectly placed to find the best of what's on offer at any time of year - with the result that guests (and the team) are getting really delicious, imaginative healthy food every day.

Well, I say healthy ... with the puddings and the daily afternoon cake too I am going to be the size of a house by the end of the season if I'm not careful. I'm not sure that spending a few extra hours on the pole lathe will compensate.

(For everyone who's been on courses in the past, my wife Boo - who was responsible for the much-praised food up until this year - simply has too much to do with her own work as an artist to keep on in that role too.)

Camping, Pizza And Cider!

Now, if that's not a great combination I don't know what is!

We will be open for Dorset Art Weeks, 29th May - 13th June. Over this fortnight we're not running any courses and so everyone is very welcome to simply come along and see the Woodland Workshop at any time during the day. What's more it's free!

Tom (the winner of Mastercrafts) will be helping me in the woods during this period so do come and have a chat. There will be examples of what is made on all of our courses, we'll be on hand to talk about them and all other things green woodworking, and we'll be selling tools, pizza (from our home made clay oven) and delicious local cider too.

My wife Boo will also be showing her paintings from her new studio over the lane at Higher Holditch Farm. (I did mention she was busy being an artist.) You can see some examples of her work here:

http://www.boomallinson.co.uk/

For full details of all of the 340 venues open as part of Dorset Art Weeks, please visit:

http://www.dorsetvisualarts.org/

And of course if you fancy camping in the woods during the fortnight, just get in touch in the normal way.

The News Just In

A new phenomena for 2010 has been guests tweeting on Twitter and posting to Facebook during courses. This means their friends have been able to see lunch being cooked as it happens and the products of each course evolve over the duration. I'm not sure whether any of the goings-on in the Woodland Workshop really constitute 'news', but I'm trying to keep up with all this progress too, with my own regular tweets and Facebook additions, and lengthier blog posts when I can (see above for the direct links).

Some guests also have some great blogs. These two links to blog entries by Karen Wilde focus on Primitive Pottery:

Karen Wilde (1)
Karen Wilde (2)

as does Hen Anderson's, while Nathalie Roberts' one reports on a day in the Woodland Workshop on a course for children.

Talking of my own blog, there are some recent posts on it about the courses so far this year including photos of the 'new for 2010' courses. So, if you've not visited it lately and want to see more about what's going on, do take a look.

BBC Mastercrafts -
What Happened Next

A lot of our guests saw the Mastercrafts series and have asked what the three trainees have been doing since. Here's a quick update.

Tom, as well as helping out here for Dorset Art Weeks, is coming to assist me in teaching the Make A Chair From A Tree and Pole Lathe & Green Woodworking courses. I'm looking forward to teaching with Tom and not being in the role of 'TV mentor'.

Away from the Woodland Workshop, Tom's been helping convert a garage into a workshop so that he can continue with his chair making and he's also been doing some work experience with the National Trust, cleaving oak laths for wattle and daub walls, part of a Tudor timber framed manor house in Hereford. And if all that's not enough, Tom's also been continuing with his chicken house making business and will be at the Totnes show on 25th July and the Yealhampton show on the 28th July.

Sarah has been working hard for her degree as well as continuing her work with 'stick furniture' as a direct result of her time here - which is really great to hear. Sarah's degree show is running for the rest of this week so do pay her a visit if you are anywhere near Lincoln.

Direction Exhibition 2010, Sam Scorer Gallery, 5 Drury Lane, Lincoln, LN1 3BN - open until Sat 29th May. (The BA Hons Contemporary Decorative Crafts/ BA furniture graduate exhibition.)

Sarah's website is also now finished and can be found here.

Last but not least, Charlie has been working hard to satisfy the planners with his new Forest Garden Shovelstrode project and we are all crossing our fingers that this process will soon be over and that he can get stuck in to creating his dream.

His new yurt arrived and looks fantastic, as does his new website which is well worth a visit too. There's further info on Facebook here.

We are also hoping to see Charlie down in the woods at some point during Dorset Art Weeks.

Tool Of The Month

The small spoon gouge we sell fits snugly into the palm of your hand and is very handy, not just for carving spoons but also for all tasks where you have to get into a concave surface. The conveniently bent neck and bevel alow you to get into really tight spots making it a pleasure to use, with just hand pressure and no mallet. A must for budding spoon carvers.

As always, you can buy tools - including spoon gouges - from our online shop by credit/debit card or you can order by post and pay by cheque. More details are on the 'tools' page.

*****

That's it for this month. Thanks for reading.

Guy and the team

Tree of the Month: English Oak - Quercus robur

Oak is the quintessential British woodland tree. In the post-glacial wildwood that once covered the country, a mixture of oak and hazel woodland flourished from lowland Scotland in the north down to the Midlands, and west over most of Wales and the west country. There are two native species; the sessile oak, Quercus petraea, is commonest in the north and west, where it will grow even on rocky, windswept sites. We lived for a while in the temperate rainforest zone (yes, really!) of coastal west Wales, where the rugged landscape was scattered with many remnant woodlands made up of dwarfed, lichen-encrusted specimens of Q petraea. In the rest of the country within the oaks' range, Quercus robur, the English oak, is the more common and widespread tree.

Although Q robur is so named for its strong, robust habit, its methods of propagation are rather haphazard. Having taken up to 50 years to start producing acorns, the majority of these seeds that fall will be eaten, or will rot. Further, although sessile oaks will grow from acorns which fall and take root under the parent tree, Q. robur will not. Mace tells me that the only native means by which an oak can spread uphill is if a jay carries the acorn out of the wood and then drops it uphill of the tree. Nowadays the invading grey squirrels also do the job of taking acorns and burying them away from the parent tree, where they have a chance of growth.

As the leaves of the various oaks can have a similar, and variable, appearance, the best way to tell what sort of oak you are looking at is to pick up an acorn. Q. robur, the English oak is also known as the pedunculate oak, because it carries its acorns on little stems, or peduncles. Q. petraea, the sessile oak, from the Latin sessilis, meaning stalkless, does not. Unfortunately for the purposes of identification, the two species hybridise freely, but although both may be found in woodlands, human intervention has ensured that the English oak is more widespread. For a long time acorns had a commercial value in their own right as they were used to fatten livestock; in the Domesday Book, woodland is measured by the number of pigs it could support. Because of this, and because the timber was valued for ships, buildings, charcoal and furniture, and the bark essential for tanning, Q. robur was widely planted, although Q. petraea was also managed as coppice for bark and for the production of hot-burning charcoal in the north and west.

The English Oak is a tree steeped in myth, history, and the very essence of Englishness. Celtic mythology assigns the qualities of courage, inner strength and endurance to the oak, qualities reiterated centuries later in the famous lines from an eighteenth century sea shanty: 'Heart of oak are our ships / Heart of oak are our men'. When England's ships were made of oak, it could take 2,000 trees or more to make even a small ship, and Nelson's Victory took 6,000, of which 90% were oak. The requirements of the navy equated to thousands of trees being felled every year; as it takes up to 150 years for an oak tree to reach maturity, massive forward planning was required to ensure that there were sufficient oaks available for the nation's shipbuilding. In the New Forest, for example, the Enclosure Act of 1698 was enacted "For the Increase and Preservation of Timber in the New Forest" for the navy of William III. Pollarding was banned at the same time, as the navy needed straight, mature trees, which would be lost through such woodland management practice.

As well as the practical uses of this robust and powerful tree, it also has great symbolic use. The acorn is representative of immortality, power and persistence - 'Great oaks from little acorns grow'. Acorns, along with oak leaves are often used in heraldic designs with this meaning. The early Celtic veneration of the oak was also absorbed into the Christian tradition in other symbolic ways; carvings of oak trees, leaves, acorns, and oak-apples are found in most of the cathedrals, and many old churches, sometimes with a carving of the powerfully symbolic Green Man, wreathed in oak leaves that spring forth from his mouth.

These real and perceived qualities of longevity and power led to the oak taking a special place in the British cultural and physical landscape. Oaks were planted to mark boundaries, crossroads and meeting places; historically, charters were read, and laws passed, beneath them; Kings were crowned and marriages took place. Druids taught and made ceremonies under them. In time, some of the sacred pagan trees were Christianised as 'gospel oaks' used by the clergy to pause and preach to the congregation while Beating the Bounds - a tradition that is itself a Christianised version of early fertility rites. Historically, there is a great tangle of oak-themed ceremonies in May, some Christian, some pagan, and some secular. Some establishments and villages with a strong royalist tradition still celebrate Oak Apple Day, a now-defunct public holiday commemorating the restoration of the monarchy. During his exile, Charles II famously hid in an oak at Boscobel; on his triumphant return to London, it was decreed that May 29th should henceforth be a public holiday 'for the dressing of trees'. This event dates from 1660, but may be related to a much earlier pagan ritual involving an oak-clad Garland King, celebrated around the same time.

A couple of lovely oak facts to leave you with: The oak supports more than 500 species of insects and invertebrates - the greatest number of any British broadleaf. It has been estimated that a mature open grown specimen may have a leaf area measuring up to seven acres - that's seven acres of solar panels!

Carolyn Brightwater

Previous Newsletters

May 2010