Cork

About time for an update or it’s going to look like we never came back to the city! Corsica was a fine place to unwind for a couple of weeks, some serious hiking for the brave and slack rambling around the coast for us. Travelling by public transport out of season can be a bit of a challenge, but so long as you don’t mind where you end up it takes a lot of the choice out of where to go, which is curiously relaxing.
We’ve come back determined to seek out more cork products after rediscovering such a beautiful and much underused resource. The Cork Oak forests of the Mediterranean are a hugely precious ecosystem with high levels of biodiversity. The production of cork is a sustainable and important economic activity where the traditional skills are part of a unique cultural heritage. The Cork Oak trees are harvested every 10-12 years by hand and it’s a skilled job to carefully remove the thick outer layer of corky bark with small axes. The harvesting doesn’t harm the tree and a new layer of cork grows back so it’s a brilliantly renewable resource. We saw huge curved slabs by the roadside, piled up like rough roof tiles. The newly stripped trees are so beautiful, their naked limbs are such a deep ochre-red they looked like some enchanted forest. Way too gorgeous to be hidden away as bottle stoppers or pin boards and facing decline as more wine producers move to screw cap bottles. We came across cork fabric (a sort of vegan suede), huge cork bowls and platters (no more bruised fruit), cork sandals (for walking on water?), cork umbrellas (cork is waterproof as well as insulating) and even cork postcards. Actually we would quite like to find a source of recycled bottle corks too, but so far everyone we’ve asked has thought we were joking or a bit bonkers...
Anyway, time to grab the camera and get some shots of all the lovely new eco goods we’ve got in the shop and been meaning to get on the site...