If you visited the 2025 Flower magazine showhouse, then the woven wonder of a willow backsplash in designer Amanda Khouri’s cutting room, no doubt, lingers in your memory among the most delightful surprises of nature-infused interior design. You might also remember designer Sarah Bartholomew’s stunning woven-willow basket skirting a freestanding tub at Southern Living’s 2021 Idea House in Louisville, Ky. In both of those eye-popping design challenges, it was artist Justin Roberts, from Murray, Ky., who helped to weave — literally — a hint of wildness into refined interiors.

Roberts’s innovative flourishes of wickerwork are rooted in European landscaping traditions of wattle fencing, in which pliable branches, such as willow or hazel, are interwoven through stakes, creating organic, nail-free barriers for gardens and livestock. After working in restaurant kitchens and observing the discouraging habits of so much cooking waste, Roberts found his way to wattle via The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan’s book and documentary exploring the interconnection of humans and plants. The show on PBS inspired Roberts to try his hand at basket-weaving, a pursuit that escalated into an apprenticeship making willow furniture with renowned Kentucky craftsman George Beard. Along the way, Roberts built a side-hustle weeding invasive species from friends’ gardens. He says that Sisyphean task led him to “stop fighting what I hate and start working with what I love.”

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Thus began Roberts’s commission-based environmental art business, Walk the Willow. Roberts’s diverse portfolio ranges from willow loveseats to oversized mushrooms and human forms rising from the understory of the woods–often intertwining unwanted invasive honeysuckle and privet into highly desirable structures of willow. “Pretty much anything can be created, whether it’s furniture, a backsplash, a tub skirt, a sculpture or a chuppah for a wedding,” says Roberts, who is currently the 2026 sculptor in residence at Ladew Topiary Gardens in Maryland.

While the organic nature of outdoor wicker works means they ultimately break down, Roberts embraces the decay as part of his artistic communion with nature. “There’s a sense of poetry,” he says. “With anything you love in life, you have to let it go.”

For now, many of his works stand strong in public parks and private gardens. His vast “7 Flower” sculpture of driftwood, willow, metal and found objects stands taller than a car outside Smith Grove Library Branch in Bowling Green, Ky. His larger-than-life windswept wicker-woven horse grazes gracefully on the grounds of an arboretum in New Jersey. And, in case you’re wondering where it went, a one-time wattle backsplash from a Flower showhouse now graces the border of a private garden in Nashville.