Willow Worlds at Muiredge Park, as a story, begins with the opening of Levenmouth Academy next door. The nature restoration stories at Bat’s Wood are a sort of Silmarillion to the the Willow World’s Hobbit. Fortunately, the nature restoration stories of Bat’s Wood are much easier to read than the early mythology of Tolkein’s Middle Earth and, I’m not just making it up. It’s all true.
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In 2017, nobody knew what the three grey blobs on the map were. They sat on the left side of the plans like abstract punctuation, waiting for meaning. The geographers thought they might be contour lines, 3 gentle mounds in the land. But the land wasn’t gentle—it was wrecked. This was the Darkness on the Edge of Town, a place defined by an absence of interest. It was the place where the old school was buried. The new school wanted to sell it off but they had failed due to the presence of bats discovered there. This green triangle of land belongs to the bats therefore we call it Bat’s Wood.
The grey blobs of Bat’s Wood turned out to be clover, planted as a desperate first attempt to coax life from the ground. This wasn’t soil, not in the usual sense. It was made-up land—the skeletal remains of earth, flipped inside out by years of bulldozering. The topsoil was long gone, and what was left had spent millennia entombed seven meters underground. Nothing lives that deep except stone and memory. What we had wasn’t land but exposed underworld. Only the hardiest invaders—clover and a particularly tenacious grass—could cling to it.
By June 2018, the blobs had begun to transform. The clover’s nitrogen-fixing magic painted the land a vibrant green, its superpower quietly preparing the way for something more enduring: a tree plantation of 5000 native trees, each with a wooden stake and a heavy green plastic tree guard. This added to the pupil’s own tree planting efforts. Through the blobs, the beginnings of an artistic, meandering path took shape. Volunteers carved the paths into the land. I remember Tanaka-san, a student from Japan, dressed in Harajuku-chic pink, wielding a spade heavier than he was, determined to break the clay beneath the February fog. That path is still there, visible on Google Maps, though I wonder if Tanaka-san knows. We’ve built on his first scratchings.
We were full of optimism then, convinced that paths would lead to community place-making, and that clover could nurse our fledgling forest to life. With thousands of saplings, protected by green plastic tree guards we felt we had done our job and all we had to do was colour in the map and let nature take its course. But in the real world, the disturbed messy one, Nature can’t simply be summoned - like a spirit - with a bulldozer, a few thousand trees and a bag of clover seeds. Nature made Failblog, in 2018.
By the second year, the truth was undeniable: over 90% of our trees were dead. We had given the ground a nitrogen-fix, but the result was turbocharged weeds. Two metre thistles and nettles, greedy for nitrogen, choked out our saplings. The clay soil dried into something resembling pottery in summer and generations of weeds pitted themselves against one generation of trees and won. The plastic guards turned into silent grave markers for dreams that hadn’t taken root.
We stumbled in other ways too. One well-meaning idea involved tractor tyres, which we imagined as cheap and durable structures. But tyres, we learned too late, are a fire hazard and a toxic leech on the land. Farmers were only too eager to offload them onto unwitting chumps like us, rather than pay for their disposal. Other early efforts—a low willow fence, a spiral of coloured willows—were equally short-lived, succumbing to poor soil, deer, and the unrelenting weeds. I even lost the photos, as if to spare us the memory of our failures.
Yet, these failures were teachers. They taught us to observe more closely and to let go of human planning. Our efforts had been about imposing a vision when we should have been feeding an emerging picture. The problem is that when we listen to what the land needs - and what it rejects - the process takes more than years, it might take decades - an intergenerational period of time that humans find hard to think about. We have already seen this in our discussion of the shifting baselines effect.
In the following years, we added and added, not really expecting to get finished but just to see what happened. We dug damp ditches for diversity, we created wormeries, frog and toad abodes, and built bug hotels. We linked to India, to Ghana, to Tanzania and to Eton College. We became beavers and made dams, we became John Muir, we became tadpoles, we became Greta and we went to COP26 and then we became farmers. We tangled our ideas up in a place-based roots which some academics call a rhizome and… and… finally, something really happened.
The Fedge: A Breakthrough
By 2022, our focus had shifted to Health and Well-Being and we wanted to encourage people post-covid to walk on our paths. We beame artists and we planted willow; not as weak lines or fragile spirals, but as a strong, tall, living fedge—a fusion of fence and hedge. Using three-meter branches of Salix viminalis, basket willow, we created a curving structure lining Tanaka-san’s path. This time, we prepared the ground with organic matter and woodchip, and we planted with a grant from Creative Carbon Scotland, the intention to make public artwork to encourage healthy outdoor walking.
Against some predictions, it worked. The willow took root, defying the deer. Perhaps the deer found the fedge unnatural, even snake-like, and avoided it. Or perhaps the height discouraged them. But most likely, the strong structures afforded a defence against over-grazing that we didn’t expect. The breakthrough was subtle but profound. The fedge wasn’t just a structure; it was an ecological revelation. We found deer damage but the deer could not scratch away the bark around the whole trunk, so the willow survived. This banal-seeming fact—a scratched tree survives, a ringed tree dies—is life and death to a forest. The fedge, we realized, could do more than beautify paths. It could afford protection to new forests.
Tested by fire.
The first fedge had been built with a good gardener’s construction values. The stakes were a smooth pale pine and they didn’t last long. After about six months, they were spotted as prime firewood and summarily stolen and burnt, as I had feared. But living willow doesn’t burn easily and the willow had rooted well enough to remain despite the disappearance of the supporting stakes. We resolved to plant only living willow after that: thin willow branches and thick willow stakes. We would just plant trees.
Willow Worlds: A New Vision
What began as an art project, grew to become a scientific hypothesis (i.e. fedge can be a barrier against roe deer). Instead of lines of willow, we began planting in shapes: bean-like, yin-yang-like, encircling spaces of life. Inside these living walls, saplings grew unmolested, nourished by mulch and organic matter. We buried deadwood for fungi to feast upon and left insects and frogs to flourish in the safety of the thickets.
The Willow Worlds began to mimic something ancient. Like the influence of wolves on a landscape, these thickets created places where deer didn’t go—without excluding them entirely, like deer fences. We got the effects of the landscape of fear, but without the nightmare of wolves.
Over time, these spaces became lusher, greener, and unmistakably alive. They were not just tree guards but microhabitats, breathing proof that restoration could be both functional and beautiful. We could make our tree planting plastic free, the fedge was more than a barrier, it was a seed for reimagining restoration itself - something more holistic: Willow Worlds.
The Broader Picture - November 2024.
The Willow Worlds project is still evolving, but they’ve taught us something crucial: restoration is not about control. It’s about partnership. It’s about finding harmony between what we want to create and what the land will allow. And it’s about patience—a willingness to try, fail, and learn.
These living structures have become more than art or science. They’re places of refuge - for saplings, frogs, and insects - from deer and from us. In a time when so much of the world feels beyond repair, Willow Worlds offer a glimpse of what’s possible. These are small acts of hope, rooted in the belief that we can find better ways to coexist with wildlife.
The idea for Willow Worlds emerged in Bat’s Wood, but the research project began officially, this month. The research into willow structures that I’m writing about has been joined by other projects getting in on the action. I can’t do this alone, of course, so Willow Worlds has partners as well as volunteers. CLEAR Buckhaven and Methil have great resources and they want to research different tree planting methods inside the Willow Worlds. A student at Stirling University wants to study some microbiology in soil under the wildflowers next to the planted trees. So we have, not one - but three research strands happening at the same time. I like this.
The original plan for the Willow Worlds was 6 kidney bean shaped structures that form an almost disorientating, artistic mosaic of Willow Worlds. I liked the idea of being able to move right through, that the worlds would seem porous, gently guiding people and other wildlife through. I thought that the artistic quality of the original design might be important. Also, I wondered whether it was the parallel lines of fedge that kept the deer at bay.
However, the tree planters want circles to rival the Wee Forest circle nearby. They want Petri dish circles for experimental tree planting - at first I was against it - who wants to live next to a Petri dish? But in the end, I’ve chosen to give up on my bean-shapes, here. The bean-shapes of the Bat’s Wood Willow Worlds however are already spreading slowly across that site so it’s not really a sacrifice - just a strategy adjustment to accommodate research partners. Besides, the tree planters at CLEAR have come up with the promise of 80 tonnes of topsoil from a site in Kennoway and this will give the Willow Worlds a lift - quite literally, a lift - which will bury the nasty grass of Muiredge Park. Now 3 Willow Worlds, as circular mounds 14 metres across, rise like little hill-forests in my mind’s eye, and I’m happy for the rest of the day.
In Bat’s Wood, we had dug ditches by hand to create optimal soil for the easy planting of the willow rods. This was important; when we plant, we want to plant fast and easy. We want the roots to grow fast and strong—for survival in a hostile environment. We’ll use a mechanical digger for the 90 meters of ditches required. This isn’t laziness, it’s self-care: filling 90 meters of ditches with broken soil, manure, and mulch will be enough work for the volunteers.
Some people from the permaculture community might wonder if we couldn’t use a “no-dig method” to plant the willow fedge. The idea that digging harms the soil is keenly felt. Besides, after a day or two of digging, most people are ready to stop. In the chaos of this planning month, my hankering for no-dig methods has also fallen victim to the forces of compromise and the fear of failure. No-dig as a principle has a place in my heart. But for these three circles, in this rock’n’rubble soil, the mechanical digger will make planting quick and easy. We’re digging for victory—sorry worms.
I’ll make it up to you (worms): we’re incorporating no-dig techniques in Bat’s Wood, layering compost and mulch to build soil fertility without disturbing the earth below. Watch this space as we continue experimenting with these methods, reminding us that nature restoration is a journey of flexibility, patience, and care.
Conclusion.
I hope you can sort of see where we’re coming from. We have over the last few months really done the history and context (maybe too much) - we should be able to move into a more dynamic vlogging mode for December’s post. We’re going to have to find things to talk about while we watch the trees grow but hopefully we can do more with film than philosophy. Our next post will be around about New Year, so have a good one when it comes.
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