ForestHarvest: non-timber forest products in Scotland

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Scotland's wild harvests businesses

Recent years have seen a diverse range of businesses emerging, all of which depend on Scotland's wild and woodland harvests. This section of the website is an introduction to these businesses, and a point of contact for finding out more about them.

Diversity

These businesses sell:

• Raw products - e.g. foliage, wild mushrooms, wild salads
• Value-added products - e.g. country wines, preserves, craft products
• Services - e.g. courses, demonstrations - experiences rather than physical products

They use materials from:

• Wild harvesting
• Managed woodland habitats - forestry, agroforestry, coppice, willow plantations
• Cultivated native species

The ForestHarvest business directory contains examples of all these kinds of businesses, giving a window into what has come to be called Scotland's Wild Harvests sector.

Click here to take a closer look at some of these types of business.

The news page has a section for "Offers and requests" - materials which wild harvests companies have on offer or want to buy.

Beyond simply gathering from the woods

Work on "non-timber forest products" originally focused on developing economies, places where labour costs are low and forest resources are still abundant. The situation in Scotland is very different.

Most of the land in Scotland is managed - instead of an all-over shifting mosaic of more or less open habitats, there are vast areas of monoculture grazing or monoculture conifers, separated by fences. People adapt what they do accordingly. Wild harvesters gather what they need from forests, but also from hedges, gardens, fields, parks and wherever else it grows. Craftworkers looking for woody materials may browse for briars and branches from the wild, but will also use purpose-grown basketry willow or off-cuts from industrial forestry. Wholesalers and manufacturers who develop products from wild-harvested materials may then look towards cultivation in order to get a reliable and sustainable supply of a native species.

This is why a search for "non-timber forest product" businesses in Scotland has evolved into the broader collection of "Wild Harvests" businesses you will find represented here.

More about the business of wild harvesting:

• Who's producing - and buying - what, with the ForestHarvest Business Directory
• Certification and labelling schemes - including the Scottish Working Woods label
• Projects and initiatives promoting wild and woodland products in Scotland
• The Sustainable Forest Harvest project
• Scotland's harvesting guidelines for mushrooms, mosses and bulbs