the right wood

To try and find the right wood that is 4-6′ long in pencil to pinky-finger thin in almost branchless shoots that will weather the sun and rain for more than a year or two for outdoor building and sculpture does my head in!

Growing here there are dogwoods, of the striking reds and pale yellow greens, though they have usually been planted stem by stem in the few trca plantings that the city can afford and are anything but branchless. They will outlast willow birch and poplar, especially if the bark is intact, though I have the feeling that their color will bleed to a mordor black.

There are, cultivated in a few hundred ultra manicured front gardens in toronto, multi-stemmed hazel trees. They shine almost golden, and I am enamored by the beaked-hazel, which I have seen but twice in and around the don in the last five years. Most of the hazels you see are horribly pruned out of season and above the ground, since it is somewhat counter-intuitive knowledge that this short beauty will not last twenty years without being cut back down to the ground.

Here grows the principle problem with finding stems of the length I need to produce useful garden fencing and furniture; that without pruning to make the stumps more competitive and multi stemmed, they tend to divide oddly. If I could run around at night, in the right season mind, and bring these beautiful trees back ‘into cycle’ it would solve the problem of the right wood.

Another more capable and equally as water/sun resistant as hazel is the locust. There certainly is an incredible amount of work involved in removing the paired thorns of the black locust. Many days I have set out with grand schemes of processing this tree, and have switched to more useful tasks within the hour. This tree, the black locust, is unfortunately brittle, and does not take to twisting into rope to secure corners of fencing or whathaveyou. The bark is amazing, though mildly toxic, and has similar qualities to cherry or elm barks (used for chair backings, leatherlike).

Though I love the willows, unless they are planted as live structures (putting 8″ of the stem in the ground in late fall early spring, and caring for them well over the first year) I think they will rot out in 5, depending on how much sun they get to degrade the bark.

This problem evolved out of trying to make animal enclosures, and you would not invest in a massive amount of willow hurdles unless they were going to last. Hazel can buy you another 5-10 years, and I would assume locust is about the same. This is of course without treating the wood, which could be done with a turpentine produced as a byproduct of traditional charcoal production.

The list grows short, though maples, ash and others like chestnut or even yew would do beautifully, though I would prefer, in most cases to leave these tall competitive saplings intact for the most part (except for some singling or light thinning).

When I built the fence at belong, I harvested roughly 200 8-12′ thumb sized sugar maple stems per acre. This provided the uprights, numbering around 160, for the 1000 pussy willows that were then woven to make a 155′ fence. I would not have harvested more, since there was 3′ of snow and it looked like the deer and rabbits were doing enough thinning of the stems, and had their own version of forest stewardship well in hand (so to speak). Also it pays to be selective in material, since I was almost selecting to the mm to create something that was thin enough for willows to bend around but thick enough to withstand being upright. Regardless this abundance of young trees does not exist in the g.t.a. Obviously.

It seems to be a long road, enculturing the use and stewardship of branchwood to create an alternate economy in outdoor fencing, charcoal, living structures in todays urban cityscape.

One stump at a time.

http://www.foolishnature.org

on the left native red osier dogwood with invasive crack willow, leftovers from the fall in z middle

braching dogwoods on the left and willow center n right

why living knotworks?

living pussy willow

This knot was harvested in cassandra public school while the snow was blowing over a workshop on planting a living willow tunnel for the evergreen all hands in the dirt forum. In four months I have woven around 150-200 knots mostly from the material harvested at cassandra.
Since I was 12 or so I have been drawing celtic inspired knotworks mostly drawn from the book of kells and similar, though I would get through a letter sized knot and lose patience after 3-4 hours, because the drawing had a predictable end.
As I have said elsewhere the willow knots are waste material because of the way the were pruned or chewed in years past, and are not prime for fencing or basketry. Each break in the leader shoot produces two or more off-shoots which are the structural basis for each knot, and there are few options for weaving and tying these knots other than in the configuration I have made them. The only limitation to this statement is that I have noticed through time that as I become proficient and evolve different means of attaching willow to itself, different patterns evolve.
This, coupled with the awe-inspiring male or female catkins (or in the case of the dogwood I am working with now rosette style flowers) followed by leaves, brings the impetus to continue making knots far beyond my early drawings.
I am not sure if you have looked at the book of kells, but many of the illuminated knots represent animals, people or other symbols, and in this practice I will continue to create increasingly representational forms.
The first experiments have taken forms of insects, but recently I made a small beaver out of red osier dogwood.
Literally every day I am learning from the progressive revelation of growing stems and leaves, which I think of as knots growing out, like problems solving themselves.
I will post more revelations as they progress, hopefully into massive scale living representatives of animals subsisting on willow and dogwood in the don (like the beavers living in the mud banks of the don-1.5m long!).

One knot at a time though. 🙂
Morgan Zigler.

willow also from cassandra public school

http://www.foolishnature.org

Living Knotworks

after purchasing bulk willow from a supplier in southern Ontario who buys from landowners in Quebec, i collaborated with evergreen learning grounds and andreas merker to deliver a three hour workshop in Cassandra public school in NE Toronto where we built a 15′ living willow tunnel. during the workshop i took half of the twenty associates who consult for school boards (installing natural play spaces across the country), and walked over to a stone theatre with a horseshoe boardwalk above out-of-cycle willow shrubs of multiple varieties. we harvested much of what was in the way of lunchtime monitors being able to see the kids through the brush, a.k.a. to improve sight lines. this brush was full of willow whips of purple and yellow, green and red, each cut multiple times (to improve sight-lines) in the past, and so were rendered useless as living fencing or tunnel material, and indeed for baskets as well. after spinning little circles in some leftover pencil-lead thin stems, i had the idea to sculpt these malformed specimens into little representations of bugs and animals, eventually embarking on monstrous living deer and eagles, etc.

these specimens were stored outside in the cold winter we’re having, and were brought indoors to defrost before being woven into these distinct patterns which emerged (again from being trimmed in a specific way over multiple years). each cut by pruners in years past, trying to see the children through the willow, produced uniform deformities, which evolved through the careful priming and bending with my hands, into about 150 little critters, which can be seen at: http://www.foolishnature.org/homely/environmental/wood/wood.html under the heading: Living Knotworks.

If one takes a dormant willow sculpture, and entices it indoors into a bucket of warm water for two weeks it will produce large catkins and then leaves, and can then be kept indoors over the last few months of winter to learn and observe from as it grows out its knots. I have been potting these works in glass vases, and they are currently for sale @ cafe Belong located at550 bayview- evergreen brickworks in the don valley; Ossington Ideal Coffee-ossington 1blok S of Dundas, W side, and soon also available at Broadview Expresso, broadview 1blok N of Danforth, E side.
Pay them a visit if your in the neighborhood.

a little bug made out of willow lies dormant until the spring when it will sprout and be potted and sold.

This is the prototype which has been forced to grow indoors out-of-season since late November.

‘leftover and invasive’ tree baskets

of mantoba maple, willow and sugar maple

of pine limbs tied together last christmas, and cob

as seen on:

http://www.bestgreenblogs.com

a few hand tools in the forest, some time, and a thousand innovations later…….and the ymca in Brampton, ON. has a newer, safer, and healthier place for kids to play.

: The design for a 15′ tunnel for preschool kids to run their tricycles through. each pair of uprights is twisted to form somewhat equal arches which are then woven with thin saplings to make the arches conform to a tunnel.

: supported by a 5′ cedar palisade dividing the preschool kids from the toddlers in Brampton, ontario, this hut is designed and built to demonstrate various traditional building materials, such as sheets of white pine bark as roofing, woven grape vine and cedar branches, all adapted to c.s.a. childcare standards.

These images are from the ymca in brampton, ontario, who have empowered evergreen to reform the toddler and pre-school outdoor daycare spaces with some space suitable for healthy kids to grow in; a living landscape of plants, trees, and details which makes me greedy to have something similar when i was a kid. it is an odd desire, since i grew up in salmon arm, b.c. and my elementary school had forests attached to it to the tune of about 5 acres. so evergreen has now commissioned me to design and build out a brush hut, whose structural spine is a 4′ cedar fence, and each side of the fence dividing the toddlers from the pre-school kids has a little hut.

All of the material was sourced from an adjacent property called cedar glen, and when i initially arrived i thought i was looking for two trees (for the brush huts) and enough willow to make 2 fifteen foot willow tunnels. When i arrived the willow was in short supply, and what maple i could find was either relatively rare on the site, unless it had been recently cut down and was sprouting up again, a process called coppicing. (more precisely coppicing is taking advantage, and creating annual cycles between coppice areas which you cut down, of trees which re-sprout from the bark collar after a tree is cut. it is an old technology of farming trees which has been practiced for over 2000 years.) the property being called ‘cedar glen’ you could guess which young saplings i was cutting out. that’s right, the eastern white cedar. there is something infinitely satisfying, and somehow right, or ethical about using the materials of small scale forest management to effect such beautiful little children’s spaces. I walked through the woods, populated with large black cherries, white ash, and literally thousands of small cedar saplings, growing together as if for comfort. others call this growing competitively, though it was useful to release the larger cedars of their competition while harvesting for the willow, now cedar tunnels. it may be a stretch of the imagination, but i sincerely believe that this ethic carries over into the material, and thereafter into whatever is created out of it. this balance of the application of differing traditional technologies through understanding different uses of the living pars of plants and trees is, in my opinion, of great effect to children learning, since more intellectual concepts may be harder to ‘sink in’ to their excitable minds.
in the coming two weeks, which mark the beginning of june, i will continue to upload images of these shelters. right now you can clearly see the woven grape vine, cut by a crew of 250 volunteers at cedar glen, the maple, ash, white pine and other upright structural poles, though what you cannot see in the image is the small binding cedar rope, laboriously made from the inner bark, and lashed in to prevent kids from getting their limbs stuck in the hut.