It’s always spring in Dan Redden’s workshop in Hantsport, N.S. Colourful wooden flowers, all whittled by hand from maple sapling twigs and painted by hand, fill buckets and baskets. Shavings on the floor by his workbench add a woodsy scent to the air. The antique tools hanging on the wall speak of times past and the connection to Dan’s history, and the flowers’ history, too.
“It all started with a jackknife and a twig on the side of the road,” Dan says. He was working for a construction company some years ago and was waiting for others to arrive to start the day. He picked up a stick and began whittling it, and soon realized that it looked like a flower. A passion was born.
“My father was a woodworker and woodturner, and a carver, and I watched him all the time,” Dan says as he sits at his bench with a jackknife and chunk of sapling. “My grandmother was quite a crafty woman, and I picked up on creating and evolving things by hand from her. My mother loved sewing, and she loved flowers. My wife and I are gardeners, so flowers are something I can make in tribute to my parents and grandmothers, a lasting bouquet for anyone.”
Dan calls his whittled wooden flowers “ditch daisies” because he forages twigs of hardwood, mostly maple, from saplings from roadsides which have been trimmed by highway crews. But he says originally these flowers were known as Romani flowers, named for the itinerant travelling people of Europe and elsewhere who were perhaps the first to craft and sell them. “The men would make the flowers and the women would sell them door to door as they went on their travels,” he says. He is delighted to make something from foraged or scavenged wood that would otherwise go to waste.
There’s a handful of antique woodworking tools hanging on the wall behind Dan’s workbench. He explains that the draw knives can be used to remove bark from logs, but also in furniture making. The spokeshaves are, as the name suggests, used by woodworkers to shave down pieces of wood to make spokes, chair legs, paddles, even arrows. Dan has a slightly different use: he removes the blade from one of his spokeshaves and fits it to his bench where it’s perfect for skinning his sticks and shaping the butt of each flower.
“Basically, I’m sharpening a stick and leaving the shavings on the stick,” he says modestly, “Once the base is made, I switch to the jackknife to make the petals.” Often, he listens to podcasts or to music while he works, but he also has time to chat with visitors who drop in for a visit.
Although Dan has whittled flowers from alder, beech, birch, and other deciduous trees, he prefers maple saplings for their long, smooth grain.
“If you hit little pin knots in the wood, it’s a bit trickier to make the petals,” he says. He travels along country roads in Kings and Hants counties and collects sapling twigs from the stumps of bigger maples, brings them home and cuts them into 20-centimetre sticks. He dries these sticks on a rack above his workshop’s wood stove for a few days before creating his flowers.
Sitting at his bench, Dan carefully wraps painter’s masking tape around his thumbs, to protect them against the wood and the sharp blades of his knives. He says if he just sat and whittled flowers all day long, he could probably make 75 in a day, but of course there is the drying, the drilling, the painting — all steps in the process to go from a twig to a daisy. “I can get usually three flowers from each twig,” he says as he drops another flower into a basket of blooms at his feet. Once he has made several dozen, he sets them on sheets to dry for a few hours so they will absorb the colourful acrylics he will use to paint the blossoms.
“From start to finish is about eight hours, starting with the twig and going to a finished, painted flower on its stem,” Dan says as he carefully shapes out the petals on a new flower. He makes his stems out of bamboo skewers, although “originally, I was using the dried stems of goldenrod wildflowers. I still use those for the bigger daisies, but for the standard size flowers, I use the skewers, which are cheap and cheerful.” He stains the skewers with finishing wax, and does several hundred at a time, so he always has plenty on hand, “and they’re pretty close to a natural stem,” he adds.
With a basket of flowers whittled, the next step is to drill out the centre back of each one with his drill press, then glues in the stem. “Maple is a bit flexible, so once whittled, the flowers can be moulded a little, to flatten out their petals a little or pull them up to look like they are just opening,” he says.
When it comes time to paint the daisies, Dan makes up a wash out of acrylic craft paints, and after each daisy is done, it goes on a drying rack. Some of his colours might not be exactly botanically correct, but he likes trying different effects and different colours. “Not crazy about the look of neon ones,” he says, “but I’m always experimenting with new effects on the flowers.” He’s begun doing miniature daisies for tiny baskets or bouquets, and has some driftwood he plans to use for unique arrangements.
Dan likes to make up bouquets of the flowers, and adds some dried sea lavender, which grows wild along seashores and dike lands, as filler around the flowers. He’s tried spraying the sea lavender different shades for unique effects in the bouquets, because the tiny flowerheads do fade from their lavender colour as they dry and age, but he says customers love the airy, natural look.
“I’m still working on ... finding something I can use for a natural bit of greenery to go in the bouquets, but customers have been happy to either take them home and enjoy them just as I sell them, or perhaps add their own greenery, like eucalyptus,” he says. “I like to keep the bouquets affordable so that anyone can purchase them.”
Although Dan has been selling his flowers from his workshop nearly as fast as he can make them, he’s moving more into travelling sales, going to craft markets and festivals with his wares. Last winter he purchased a trailer on which he is building his own version of a Romani wagon, which will be painted in bright colours. He can haul this with his car and plans to go on the road on summer weekends to sell his ditch daisies.
Dan is reluctant to call himself an artist despite the pride he takes in what he’s doing, and the delighted response from customers who come to visit. He’s quick to also stress that making his ditch daisies is not a business, but a hobby that pays for itself. And while he works fulltime from April until October, there are always evenings and weekends to create his art.
He likens flower making to gardening, another passion. “Maybe it’s a diversion from the stresses of life, like gardening. You get outside and focus on the task at hand, and growing something or making something is such a pleasure.
“I always find time to make me happy,” he says.