We love wood! It is a wonderful sensory material to handle, and a brilliant resource for developing simple tool skills. As well as encouraging it's use, we want to promote the importance and benefits of sourcing the wood we use from local, sustainable woodlands.
A sustainable alternative to plastic play and learning resources.
Our UK-grown wood products are sourced from a sustainably-managed woodland, helping to maintain the balance between ecological, economic and sociocultural factors and supporting the viability of UK woodlands in the future. Buying UK wood also benefits local livelihoods, biodiversity and ecosystems, and provides recreational opportunities that improve health and wellbeing.
Our UK-grown wood products are hand-harvested. When trees are removed it allows light to penetrate to the woodland floor, enabling new growth and encouraging diversity in the woodland flora and fauna. Hand-harvesting by skilled craftspeople as part of a sustainable management plan allows wood to be extracted sympathetically with minimum disturbance to the natural environment.
As our UK-grown wood grows it traps atmospheric carbon and produces oxygen; once cut it travels a relatively short distance to be processed in our workshop. In contrast, consider a plastic item travelling from far overseas, and the resources, including fossil fuels, that were used to make it.
Natural untreated wood is fully biodegradable and, with a little help from some fungi, it will decompose, adding nutrients to the ground when it has reached the end of its useable life. Our UK-grown wood products are not treated with any chemicals and are safe to be left to degrade naturally at the end of their lifespan. How about making insect habitats from them?
Connecting to nature from an early age helps instil a deep, sometimes intuitive, sense of our place within the natural world, that leads to a love and respect for our environment. To play and learn with wood is a full sensory experience. The unique character of each piece can be explored, with its bends, knots, flaky bark, different colours, textures and smells.
Our ethos of using & promoting UK-grown wood is so important to us that every year we dedicate a page in our catalogue to explaining why. Here's the same information as it appeared in our 2026 catalogue, and available as a download below.
UK grown wood
UK-grown wood
Supporting woodlands for the future for everyone from Early Years to adults.
All our natural wood products are handmade in the Muddy Faces workshop from materials sourced from sustainably-managed woodlands in the UK. The management of these woodlands supports local crafts people and local wildlife for a sustainable future.
Read More about UK-grown wood
All our natural wood products are handmade in the Muddy Faces workshop from materials sourced from sustainable, managed woodlands in the UK. The management of these woodlands support local crafts people and local wildlife. Each piece of our wood is in its natural form and still has its bark on. Every piece has its own unique character with bends, knots, flaky bark, different colours and number of growth rings.
If you'd like to know more about UK grown wood click here.
Tree trunk cross section