The Last Trugg Maker
A Garden Basket Woven from Sweet Chestnut and Willow, Made by One Man on the Suffolk Coast
A trugg is a shallow garden basket with a curved, boat-like body made from thin boards of sweet chestnut nailed to a frame of cleft ash or willow. It is one of the most elegant objects in the English gardening tradition - light, strong, shaped to carry flowers, herbs, vegetables, and soft fruit without bruising them, and beautiful in a way that is entirely incidental to its function. Nobody designed a trugg to be beautiful. They designed it to work. The beauty came from the materials and the method, and from the fact that anything made well enough, for long enough, arrives at a kind of perfection that no amount of deliberate aesthetics can improve upon.
The trugg is associated almost exclusively with Sussex. The name itself is thought to derive from the Anglo-Saxon trog, meaning a wooden vessel or trough, and the craft of making them was centred for centuries on the town of Herstmonceux in East Sussex, where the Thomas Smith company produced truggs from the 1820s until the late twentieth century. The story goes that Smith presented a trugg to Queen Victoria at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and she was so taken with it that she ordered several for the royal gardens. The royal endorsement turned a local agricultural basket into a national gardening icon.
That was the peak. The decline that followed has been long, quiet, and nearly complete.
The Anatomy of a Trugg
A trugg has two main components: the frame and the boards. The frame is the skeleton - a handle that arcs over the top and two curved rails that form the rim of the basket, all made from lengths of cleft sweet chestnut, ash, or willow that have been steamed and bent into shape. The boards are thin strips of sweet chestnut, shaved to a uniform thickness with a drawknife, that are nailed across the frame to form the body of the basket.
The boards overlap like the clinker planking of a boat. This is not a coincidence. The trugg is essentially a miniature clinker-built vessel, and the technique of overlapping planks to create a watertight (or in this case, nearly airtight) shell is the same one that shipwrights used on the Sussex coast for centuries. The connection between boatbuilding and trugg-making is direct and acknowledged: the trugg-makers of Herstmonceux were drawing on the same tradition of working with cleft wood and steam-bent frames that built the fishing boats of Hastings and the barges of the Ouse.
The sweet chestnut is critical. It cleaves cleanly along the grain, producing boards of remarkable consistency without the waste and effort of sawing. It is naturally resistant to rot. It is light. And when shaved thin - a sixteenth of an inch, no more - it has a flexibility that allows the boards to follow the curve of the frame without splitting. No other native timber does all of these things as well. Oak is too heavy. Ash does not cleave as cleanly. Elm rots. Sweet chestnut is the only material that gives a trugg its particular combination of lightness, strength, and grace.
The Making
The process begins in the woodland. The sweet chestnut must be felled, split, and seasoned. Trugg-makers have always preferred coppiced chestnut - poles of eight to twelve years’ growth, straight-grained and knot-free, split from the round with a froe and mallet. The splitting is done by hand because a saw cuts across the grain, weakening the wood, while a froe follows the grain, producing boards with their fibres intact. This matters. A sawn board breaks. A cleft board flexes.
The cleft billets are then shaved with a drawknife on a shaving horse - a foot-operated vice that holds the wood while the maker draws a long, sharp blade toward them, reducing the billet to a thin, even board. The drawknife is one of the oldest woodworking tools in existence. Using one well requires the same sustained, rhythmic effort as any repetitive craft skill: the angle of the blade, the pressure of the cut, the thickness of the shaving all controlled by feel rather than measurement. A good trugg-maker can produce boards of uniform thickness by touch alone, without checking.
The frame is made from longer pieces of cleft wood, steamed in a chest until pliable, then bent around a former into the characteristic curves of the handle and rails. The wood must be bent while hot and held in shape until it dries and sets. Too much heat and the wood scorches. Too little and it snaps. The window of workability is narrow, and the maker has perhaps thirty seconds to complete the bend before the wood cools and stiffens. It is a moment of controlled urgency in an otherwise patient process.
Assembly is done with small copper or brass nails - never iron, which would react with the tannin in the chestnut and stain the wood black. The boards are laid across the frame, overlapping, and nailed through into the rails. Each nail must be placed precisely: too close to the edge and the board splits, too far in and the overlap is inadequate. The finished trugg has a smooth interior - no rough edges, no protruding nails - and a gently curved exterior that sheds water and looks, from a distance, like a small wooden boat inverted on the ground.
Herstmonceux and the Sussex Trade
For most of its history, trugg-making was a cottage industry concentrated in and around Herstmonceux, a village in the Sussex Weald about seven miles north of Eastbourne. The village sat at the edge of extensive sweet chestnut coppice - the raw material was, literally, on the doorstep - and by the mid-nineteenth century it had become the undisputed centre of the trade. Several workshops operated in the village and the surrounding area, producing truggs in a range of sizes from small herb baskets to large harvest carriers.
The Thomas Smith company, established in the 1820s, was the largest and longest-lived. The royal connection gave the business a marketing advantage that lasted well into the twentieth century. “By Royal Appointment” was not a phrase the Smith family took lightly. The truggs they produced were of a consistently high standard, and the business survived through multiple generations, adapting to changing markets while maintaining the essential craft.
But the economics were always marginal. A trugg takes time to make. The materials require sourcing and processing. The skills take years to develop. And the finished product, however beautiful, competes in a market full of cheaper alternatives. Plastic tubs, wire baskets, mass-produced wooden trays from overseas - all of these undercut the handmade trugg on price, even if none of them matched it on quality or character. The workshops closed one by one. The Thomas Smith company eventually ceased production. By the early twenty-first century, the number of people making truggs in Sussex by the traditional method could be counted on one hand.
The Craft Now
The Heritage Crafts Association lists trugg-making as critically endangered. The classification is precise and sobering: it means the craft is at immediate risk of extinction in the United Kingdom, with fewer than a handful of practitioners working at a professional level. The knowledge required to make a trugg properly - from selecting and felling the chestnut through to the final assembly - is held by very few people. If they stop, it stops.
The makers who remain work in a different context from their predecessors. They are not supplying a mass market. They are producing individual pieces, often to commission, for people who understand what a trugg is and what it represents. A handmade Sussex trugg sold in 2026 is not a garden basket in the way it was in 1926. It is a statement - about materials, about craft, about the value of things made slowly and well. The market is small but it exists, and it is populated by people who are willing to pay a real price for a real thing.
Some makers teach. Trugg-making workshops attract the same audience as other heritage craft courses: people who want to work with their hands, who are drawn to traditional materials, and who understand that learning to make something from scratch is a different experience from buying it finished. These courses are valuable. They spread the knowledge. They create awareness. But a weekend workshop does not produce a trugg-maker. The craft requires years of practice before the hands know what they are doing without the mind having to direct every movement.
The Material Chain
The trugg depends on sweet chestnut coppice. The coppice depends on management. The management depends on demand. This is the chain that sustains the craft, and every link in it is under pressure.
Sweet chestnut coppice was once one of the most productive woodland systems in southern England. The wood was used for fencing, hop poles, gate hurdles, walking sticks, barrel staves, and truggs. Each use required a different age of coppice - a different diameter of pole - and the management of the woodland rotated through these ages in a cycle that kept the whole system in production. When the demand for any one product fell, the management cycle was disrupted, and the woodland began to change.
The demand for most coppice products has collapsed. Hop poles are no longer needed in the quantities they once were. Chestnut fencing competes with treated softwood. Gate hurdles have been replaced by metal gates. The trugg-maker who needs straight, knot-free chestnut poles of a specific age and diameter is competing for material from a dwindling number of managed coppice coupes. Some makers manage their own woodland. Some have long-standing arrangements with coppice workers. Some struggle to find material at all.
This is a pattern that repeats across every craft in this archive. The maker depends on the material. The material depends on the landscape. The landscape depends on the management. And the management depends on someone, somewhere, needing the product enough to keep the whole cycle turning. When the product loses its market, the cycle breaks - not at one point but at every point simultaneously. The trugg-maker cannot make truggs without chestnut. The coppice worker cannot sell chestnut without a market. The woodland cannot sustain itself without coppicing. Each part needs the others, and the loss of any one threatens all.
One Man, One Workshop
There is a particular weight to the phrase “the last.” It implies finality, and finality is not quite what is happening here. The craft is not dead. It is critically ill. The difference matters, because it means there is still time - just - to pass the knowledge on.
A trugg-maker working alone in a workshop on the Suffolk coast, or in a shed in the Sussex Weald, or in any of the small, quiet places where these crafts persist, is carrying something that no museum can hold. Museums hold objects. They do not hold the feel of a drawknife biting into green chestnut. They do not hold the instinct for when the steamed wood is ready to bend. They do not hold the knowledge of which tree in which coppice will produce the best cleaving material in which year. That knowledge lives only in the person who carries it, and it transfers only through proximity - through the slow, patient process of one person teaching another by standing next to them and correcting their hands.
The trugg itself is just a basket. It holds flowers, vegetables, herbs, and the afternoon’s harvest. It sits on a garden bench and looks like it has always been there. It weighs almost nothing. It will last, with care, for thirty years or more.
What it carries, besides the garden’s produce, is the entire chain of knowledge and landscape and material that made it possible. The sweet chestnut coppice. The shaving horse. The steam chest. The drawknife. The copper nails. The hands of the maker, and the hands of the maker before them, and the hands before that, reaching back through the centuries to a time when every village in the Weald had a man who could make one.
Now there are very few. The trugg waits to see if there will be more.