Friday, June 21, 2013

The Tulip Tree


 
Tuliptree flower
Tulips are flowers, right? Yup. For us woodturners though, when someone says "tulip", we think "big tree". The mighty Tulip Poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera) has the reputation of being the tallest growing hardwood in the eastern North American forest. It's also known as the Tuliptree, or Yellow Poplar, but it's not really a poplar; it belongs to the Magnolia family. 
Tuliptree Leaf (underside)


Here in southern New England, Tuliptrees flower in June. They produce fairly large tulip-like flowers that are quite pretty, but most people are probably completely unaware of them, since they tend to appear on lofty branches and go unnoticed by the masses. Even the outline of the large leaves suggests a tulip.    

While these trees are not rare in this area, they're not exactly plentiful either, and it's not often that we wood hoarders, er, turners, get an opportunity to acquire sizable chunks of tulip wood. So when I recently saw a bucket truck crew lopping the very top limbs off a huge one on a busy road, I knew it was time to call Bob to tell him there would soon be (literally) tons of large-diameter tulip on the ground. We were both already familiar with this big tree, since it was located 5 minutes from Bob's home, and we've admired its stature before. 

Sadly and surprisingly though, someone somewhere had decided this monster was a threat to something somehow, and it had to be unceremoniously brought down. And down it came. 

Read on ....

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Old Growth Forests in Massachusetts



While this blog is primarily about woodturning, and the latest projects in the shop, it seems appropriate to talk about some of the places where wood comes from, namely, forests.

There are plenty of trees coming down for various reasons to keep a wood consumer like me supplied for life, so there's no need (or desire) for me to go out and cut down living trees just to get my hands on some wood. No, I'd much rather appreciate trees in their glory days.


1 - Towering old White Pines
And, wanting to see trees in all their glory, there's simply no better place to do that than in an old growth forest. But that's not always an easy thing to pull off. So little old growth is left to be seen, since our forests have long ago been ravaged by insatiable lust for timber and developable land.

However, even here in Massachusetts, there are small tracts of gorgeous old forest; not necessarily virgin forest, but old nonetheless. The previous blog post talked about Bob Leverett, widely recognized as the "eastern old growth guru". This article is a continuation of that topic, with updates. If you haven't read the previous post, you might want to do that now before continuing. Otherwise, click on "Read more" below ....