Forty years ago, I lived in rural Northern California and crafted furniture from redwood tree stumps. Logging operations a century ago had left the stumps behind. After a year, I moved back to the city to find work, but I kept a couple of the finest redwood slabs and made them into tables. I just refinished one of those tables. Below the orange ampersand, I offer before-and-after pictures of that process, and narrative about burls, trees, and lumber's longevity.
The Backyard Science group regularly publishes The Daily Bucket, which features observations of the world around us. What's in your backyard? Funny insects, unusual birds, pretty flowers, healthy vegetables, or shy snakes?
Any of these and much more are worthy additions to the Bucket and its comments. Please let us know what is going on around you in a comment, and provide a picture if you can. Include, as close as is comfortable for you, where you are located. Each note is a record that we can refer to as we try to understand the patterns that are unwinding around us.
Winter weather had chewed right through multiple coats of Marine Varnish, destroying the table surface.
It was so torn up that I decided to flip it over and sand what had been the underside, rather than strip and refinish the damaged top.
However, that presented its own challenges, including removing mold that dug into the underside.
The wire brush vanquished the mold, and the power sander eventually removed the old chain saw marks and revealed the intricate burl grain that dominated this slab.
I had planned to sand it down with worn 80 grit (coarse) sandpaper, and call it good. But as the "bird's eye" burl patterns asserted themselves, I become hypnotized by their designs, and hours later I was still sanding, now with 220 grit (very fine) sandpaper, as if it was a jewel.
I finally ran out of patience and put on new coats of varnish. Every coat looked more beautiful; I finally lost count of how many I put on. Here's the finished product:
The redwood burl is a woody material full of unsprouted bud tissue. Each "bird's eye" is a potential bud and a new tree. The burl stores the genetic code of the parent tree. If drought, fire or other factors damage the tree, the burl will sprout with an exact clone of the parent tree.
Sometimes you can find a groups of redwoods growing in a circle, called a fairy ring. These are remnants of a long-fallen parent tree. Each of the younger trees sprouted from locations on the parent tree's burl that had encircled its trunk. Some might say the parent tree could live forever through these progeny. After all, the tree's formal name of Sequoia sempervirens means ever-living.
The coastal redwoods are unique in that they can sprout from either seeds, or from their burls. Some other plants in redwood forests can also sprout from burls, including big-leaf maple, bay laurel, rhododendron, and huckleberry.
http://home.nps.gov/...
I marvel at the redwood slab's strength. I've owned it for 40 years, and it has spent many of those (post-batchelor) years outside, subjected to Oregon's 4 feet of annual rain, yet it is still sturdy, bug-free, and takes a sanding and varnish with lovely results.
Now It's Your Turn What's interesting to you? Please post your own observations and your general location in the comments. I'll respond after lunchtime because I work tomorrow morning.
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