Because all trees are special…
and before wood is wood, it’s trees.
Forestry. The planting, the growing, the nurturing, by foresters, forest operations teams and dedicated tree stewards.
Have you ever cut a tree, or even a small shrub down? Not easy… Rob Penn will tell you. Selecting and felling a tree requires the utmost care, diligence, discipline, wisdom and energy. It’s much mulled over, and when it happens, it’s a big day. It happens to create light and space so that each standing tree can thrive.
We get the left-overs.
As you may or may not know, we’re a woodyard 😉 We work with wood, the by-product of good forestry. We’re practiced at converting this forestry waste to usable materials for working with. The air dried Western Red Cedar is a good example. We convert it from trees to fresh sawn boards for machining cladding. The sawn boards are made into packs (with sticks). The packs are kept outdoors on the pad, gently drying. Neat. Squared. Balanced. Strapped. Piled high. Weighted.
A typical woodyard.
Wood. Lots of it.
And it strikes us, our Cedar doesn’t look very special.
It looks as ordinary as any timber merchant offering.
And most merchants don’t even give it a species name. They’ll lump them all together and call it ‘redwood’ if you’re lucky, or ‘softwood’ mostly. It’s treated as much of a muchness, which is pretty hard to swallow. Especially when wood as a raw material is so special, becoming more so every climate-changing carbon-laden day.
Well wood folks, we can promise you this… all of our wood is special. Hardwood or softwood.
And it has a species name. Names matter.
So this ordinary looking stuff is Western Red Cedar. It has unique and special qualities that originate in the elegant, upright, feathery-limbed tree it once was. The wood from this courtly conifer has lightness, stiffness and stability with a broad grain and creamy brown colouring.
It grew nearby, was tended for decades by foresters, and inevitably, was felled (as a by product) with you in mind – which means it wasn’t chipped and sent for horse bedding! That’s part of what’s making it special. It was growing, and now it’s not. We need all the left-over wood to work with. To design and make and build healthy, sustainable ‘things’ with.
That’s part of what’s making it special. It was growing, and now it’s not. And we need trees, but this stuff had to be weeded out. So we get wood to work with. To design and make and build with. You see, before the wood bit, comes the tree bit. Always. The growing, the nurturing, the foresters and forest operations teams, the dedicated tree stewards.
Like these two such forest folk. Meet David Funnell and Michael Prior.
Michael is head forester of Stansted Park Estate in Hampshire. He is the consummate woodsman and naturalist. In @royal_forestry president Sir James Scott’s words he’s “unstintingly provided dedicated and sensitive environmental stewardship of the highest order as well as creating a space for public”. That’s so true. If you’ve ever walked in Stansted forests you’d soon feel the love.
The packs on the pad were trees from Michael.
The other smiley, happy forester you see here is our Dave, tending to the hand-felling of Western Red Cedar. Cleaning the lop and top from butts by hand too. Super skilled. He started in working woodlands before he’d finished school and he’s still here, day in, day out. The images are a bit of a throwback to a time when he used to get his hands dirty 😉 Nowadays David carefully manages forest operations across the south of England with @englishwoodlandsforestry and #PowellForestry, sometimes sending us through the produce of a particular woodland, like these packs from Stansted.
These are the people that work with trees that make wood possible. Trusted with someone precious trees, allowed in their woodlands with a chainsaw, working every daylight hour mother nature provides to create light and space for the woodland future.
All trees are special.
Therefore all wood is special.
Here ended the sermon
MORE
READ more about Western Red Cedar species
SEE the Western Red Cladding timber cladding products we make
LEARN more about timber cladding
DOWNLOAD the Timber Cladding Handbook from TDUK
