Baskets are some of the oldest forms of containers created by hand. Examples from the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians help us understand how those civilizations went about their everyday tasks. Baskets were shaped for various purposes—a basket with gentle curves to hold eggs, a tightly woven basket to hold grain, a basket with a handle to make it easy to carry crops in from the field. Over time we’ve come to see that these humble baskets have great beauty. Years ago I began collecting Native American baskets. A favorite serves as a wallet, woven so finely there are 1,500 threads per square inch. It was made by the Native Americans who lived on the island of Attu in the Bering Strait.

I have another group of baskets constructed by the Cherokee, woven of honeysuckle vines and made to hold trinkets or to be used for gathering berries. In the 1970s I owned a shop, The Potted Plant, where we created the now-ubiquitous basket flower arrangements, filled with ferns and other exotics mixed with flowering plants. We sold them as “Flowering Compositions,” and they were quite the thing in their day. For florists, baskets are part of their stock-in-trade. Florists will have stacks and stacks of baskets around, woven of bamboo, wire, and osier—particularly willows with long twigs well suited for basketmaking.