Martin Slocock
Martin talks about working at his nursery

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There were huge osier beds and that’s another – I’ve mentioned the rye straw and I’ve mentioned bracken, but we used to grow our own osiers, to tie up the trees.  Trees were never tied up with string - it’s much quicker to tie up trees, or a bundle of any kind, if you know how, with an osier: one loop at the thick end, you whip through the thin end, one turn, two turns and it’s done. And we used to have osier beds in that area, adjacent to the cricket field actually, and somebody’s job in the spring was to cut it all back, and it was somebody’s job in the autumn to cut the osiers and that kept the nursery going.  No string was ever used.  I don’t remember ever seeing a ball of string, before, probably, the late 70s.