“At some point over the last four hundred million years, some plant has tried every strategy with a remote chance of working. We’re just beginning to realise how varied a thing working might be. Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory. It’s called genes. To solve the future, we must save the past. My simple rule of thumb, then is this: when you cut down a tree, what you make from it should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.
A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware.”
– Richard Powers, ‘The Overstory’, pp566-567
Handspring is a small design-led organisation in the heart of Sheffield run by me – Scot Fletcher – its founder and owner. It is my attempt to run a creative, practical and skilled timber craft-based enterprise following the principles and ethics of sustainability.
I have been involved with sustainability for my whole adult life and I have approached it from a number of directions including: eco building renovations, green maps, local food, academia (architecture), research, teaching and making art installations. Yet throughout all of this the one thing that connects me to myself and links my past with the present is designing and making sustainable timber structures in a creative, crafted, hands-on way.
Celebrating and supporting a deeper connection to nature has become increasingly important to me over the years. Maybe this has been as a way to continue to feel positive and hopeful in our troubled and destructive times.
I am very lucky — if you believe in luck — to have a workshop in the middle of South Yorkshire’s largest ancient woodland. One that is currently gently expanding and merging into the local hinterland, due to the brilliant work of Sheffield City Council Rangers. I am lucky too because I get to cycle on tracks through this majestic forest every working day, washed clean and green by nature, leaving the sound of the city momentarily behind. I get to do this on a beautiful wooden gravel bike, made from Welsh ash by my very good friend and genius Andy Dix of Twmpa Cycles.
In the Handspring workshop, whilst the indoor spaces are old, dark and knackered, our open-sided barn faces south and is an amazing place to spend the day. The site is constantly serenaded by bird song, and during the nesting season we find delicate, intricate and messy nests everywhere: in the workshop, dotted through the woodpiles, and even in the tractor.
The new council visitor centre that sits next to our workshop has a large pond, full of aquatic life and beehives and often, before we pick up a piece of timber, we say hello to a honey bee, dragonfly or giant horntail and gently shake them off! The bees have swarmed a couple of times – what an amazing and momentarily terrifying experience that is. The sky darkens with spinning insects, and then they congregate around the new escaping queen, coalescing into a dense football of vibrating insect life, before heading off to find a new home.
