5 min read
Sustainable wooden gifts with a story: Kew Gardens’ tree homeware
Discover how felled trees from Kew Gardens are transforming into sustainable, handcrafted homeware, giving our trees a second life.
A second life for Kew’s trees
With over 11,000 trees, our diverse Arboretum is a living treasure chest filled with stories, science, and wonder. Some, like our old lions, have stood for over 260 years, while others are rare or endangered species that we’ve nurtured, such as the Wollemi pine.
Felled trees have been reused around the Gardens for years. Now, they’re being transformed into sustainable handcrafted wooden homeware so you can take a piece of Kew home with you and give these trees a second life.
Why are trees felled at Kew Gardens?
With a collection as large and irreplaceable as ours, it might seem strange to chop any down. However, with increasing extreme weather, in recent years we’ve lost hundreds of trees across the Gardens.
Tom Fry, arboricultural supervisor at Kew explains why:
“We’ve seen over 400 trees die since the 2022 heatwave. Some have died as a direct result of the drought, while others have had their defences weakened and become victim to pests or disease. When this happens, and a tree dies, it loses structural integrity, and could pose a risk to visitors, so we need to remove it for safety reasons.”
Tom heads up our dedicated arboricultural team, the Tree Gang, who look after our giants. They have a deep scientific knowledge of trees and understand the whole life cycle of a tree from propagation to maturity.
Their specialist skills ensure the growth, care, maintenance and risk management of our vast collection of trees, and that means felling trees from time to time.
From Kew’s felled tree to handcrafted sustainable homeware
Felled trees don’t go to waste. They’ve long been re-used around the Gardens as fencing, compost or woodchips for paths.
With the rising numbers of trees needing to be felled, our retail team reached out to Selwyn House to create a fully traceable range of eco-friendly homewares.
The Grown at Kew collection includes bowls, vases, pinch pots, cake knives and butter knives, crafted from Kew trees like box, birch, hackberry and butternut. The range will continue to expand as more wood becomes available, so be sure to sign up to our newsletter to be the first to hear about the latest additions to the collection.
Each piece offers the rare chance to own a piece of botanical history. With a unique hallmark on each item, you can trace it back to the tree it came from and the exact spot it once stood via our Grown at Kew page.
As well as being a sustainable addition to your home, you would be supporting sustainable craftspeople, and Kew’s vital research and conservation work.
Meet the makers – Selwyn House
Based in rural Northamptonshire, Selwyn House is run by woodworking duo, Sean Best and Ellie Smalls, partners in life as well as in craft. After meeting on a fine art course nearly two decades ago, they’ve combined their artistic skills, love of making and shared vision for sustainable crafts in the creation of Selwyn House.
They’re passionate about creating functional, beautiful items from British timber with strong provenance, making them the perfect partners to honour Kew’s trees. As Ellie puts it:
“When you know the exact tree your item came from, it transforms it from just ‘stuff’ into something you want to keep forever and cherish the changes through the years.”
How Kew’s trees are transformed into wooden homewares
Turning Kew’s trees into beautiful homewares is a long and careful process, with each piece taking months, if not years to reach its final form.
Smaller trees are chainsawed into rough “blanks” and turned while still green. These pieces are then packed in their own shavings and left for months to dry naturally, before being sanded, finished, and polished by hand.
Larger Kew trees, such as oak, have been quarter-sawn into boards and are in the process of being air-dried, a method used by specialists like Austin and Dan at The Quarter Sawn Oak Company, who store the large timber for Kew. This process could take years and once dried, the oak will be transformed into chopping boards and candlesticks, with plans to make furniture too.
Sean and Ellie are hands-on at every stage: from cutting and shaping to finishing with natural, food-safe oils and waxes. No two items are the same, each piece is guided by the wood’s character, knots and history.
Sean sums it up best: “It’s a hands-on and traditional process, and every single piece passes through our hands multiple times until it feels right.”
Sustainability at the core
Sustainability is the cornerstone of what we do at Kew. The partnership with Selwyn House was born out of an aim to reduce waste from the gardens, and that ethos runs through every part of the process.
Sean and Ellie make sure nothing goes to waste: Offcuts become small utensils or stacked candlesticks, wood shavings are used to dry smaller pieces and are then sent to a local stable and tiny fragments fuel their wood burner.
As Ellie explains, “We don’t chuck anything away. Everything gets used until all we’re left with is dust.”
Finished pieces are packaged minimally, with just a paper label, and using dead timber locks in the carbon stored in the wood, rather than releasing it back into the atmosphere.
Giving Kew trees a lasting legacy
This partnership between Kew and Selwyn House is about honouring the life of our trees, reducing waste, and supporting conservation.
Each collection will continue to evolve as different woods become available, meaning no two ranges will ever be the same.
From pinch pots and butter knives to vases, baubles and beyond, these pieces aren’t just eco-friendly homewares, they’re living stories from the Gardens.
By taking one home, you'll be able to own a unique piece of Kew’s history, whilst helping us protect plants, trees and ecosystems for generations to come.
Explore the collection today and take home your unique, handcrafted piece of Kew.
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