Burl: Envisioning a Vernacular Forest
WHAT IT IS
An outgrowth on the trunks of trees. The sawn and finished wood, especially of the maple, the buckeye, the walnut, prized for the intricate patterns of its grain—but none so large or valuable as the burl of Sequoia sempervirens.
A huge gnarled protuberance wrapped in deep, convoluted ridges of hairy red bark, often sprouted from a collar of bud tissue several feet above the forest floor, but also higher up, an offshoot or another trunk. A clone of the parent tree.
A reproductive alternative to the redwood’s improbably tiny cones and seeds, a reserve of incipient growth triggered by stress or wind-break, fire, drought, or just old age. Even after “death,” a tree rotted into the forest floor will send up burl sprouts, a fairy ring where a stump decayed, in a row along a rotted nurse log.
But this survival strategy had not foreseen axes and saws and human ingenuity. In the old photos the hills resemble a graveyard of bouquets sprouting from redwood headstones. So when questioned about that they’d done, the lumber men could say: “Look. They grow back like weeds.”
When the big trees, then the second growth, then the jobs were gone, many of them turned to what they knew. They became seasonal wildcrafters, berry and mushroom pickers, and from the stumps they cut burl. Small chunks got turned into bowls and lamp bases, live sprouts became baby redwoods sold at roadside tourist shops. But the most prized forest product was a sawed-off slab of the largest burl.
Unlike the straight-grained lumber they produced by the millions of board feet, woodsmen had always admired burl for its knots. the owners and bosses wanted burl for their board rooms, coffee tables, and bars. Burl became a small industry along the Redwood Highway: burl curios, lamps, book ends, or my favorite—a wall hanging, with a built-in clock. Set into the stored memory of a hundred million years—a gold clock.
In reducing the ages to hours and board feet, a lot of human history also got lost. That loss is glorified in logging museums, old machinery in front yards, tourist attractions and industry promotion, but like the burl souvenirs it doesn’t tell the older story. That rusty steam donkey was not just a faster way to move logs, but another break in a failing relationship. The Redwood Country brochures don’t remind us—and it’s way too slow for the news cycle—that our proud histories of civilization are essentially a story of deforestation. And bound together as we still are, this story of trees and humans is approaching an existential crisis. We forgot how to talk to the forest. Worse, we forgot how to listen. When we gaze upward at the monumental redwoods, when we study the whorled grain of a burl table, we are looking for a language we’ve lost.
Continue reading Jerry Martien’s Burl: Envisioning a Vernacular Forest here.
