A Backyard Trunk Could Be Your Living Room's Treasure

Seven hundred to 800 square feet of flooring could be made from this eight-foot section of a 59-inch-diameter elm tree, which once stood in a private yard in southeast Michigan. (By John Haling For The Washington Post)

When urban lumber is marketed to small, localized markets, however, it's a different story. For the right audience, the provenance of particular trees -- their origin and history -- conveys a value. When the wood is from people's property or the town where they live, the finished product will be treasured no matter the character of the wood, said Sam Sherrill, an urban planner at the University of Cincinnati. Sherrill offers himself as a case in point. For the past eight years he has been making furniture pieces from a 500-year-old, 11-foot-diameter burr oak that no commercial mill would touch for members of an extended family that for more than 150 years has owned the land where the tree stood.

Sherrill said a custom furniture or cabinet maker who buys wood in small quantities might also want some species of urban timber, but not until the wood has been processed -- milled into rough-sawn boards, kiln dried and milled a second time into a smooth, workable board that a craftsman can use.

When a tree is just a log on the ground, the wood has no value, and a tree service's charges include the cost of hauling it away. Many homeowners think the opposite should be true -- the person hauling the wood should pay them. In fact, Sherrill said, the value of a tree in someone's yard has nothing to do with wood. The value derives from the amenities the tree provides, such as enhancing the look of the house and providing shade in summer. Once a tree hits the ground, its value plummets to zero, but it can be recycled and given to a person or organization that can use it.

The U.S. Forest Service has been working with municipalities around the country to help them set up local programs to do just that -- recycle felled hardwood trees into useable lumber and other products.

Southeast Michigan has presented an unusual opportunity. The state has quarantined all ash trees in 21 counties to prevent the spread of the emerald ash boar, an invasive beetle from Asia that kills ash trees but does not destroy the wood. Within the 21 counties, most municipalities are removing thousands of ash trees from public land and encouraging homeowners to do the same.

To recycle as much of these trees as possible, the Southeast Michigan Resource Conservation and Development Council, funded by the Forestry Service, has been working with local tree services to keep the trunks intact when trees are taken down. This group has also provided grants to some of the tree services to purchase small sawmills and kilns to turn the ash logs into marketable hardwood lumber. The ash that cannot be milled is ground into mulch and used for landscaping or as fuel at an electric-generating facility in Flint, Mich., which is jointly operated by CMS Energy and Primary Power International and serves 25,000 households.

The city of Ann Arbor's recycle center has turned some of this ash into hardwood flooring for its demonstration Environmental House. From this experience, staff member Jason Bing has determined that the flooring can be made and sold to the public at a price that is competitive with commercially made ash flooring. As more of the ash flooring becomes available, Bing hopes that local home builders and remodelers will start to offer it to their clients.

For a land developer, recycling the trees on his building sites would seem to be a golden marketing opportunity. Turning them into entry flooring or something else for each house would be a hit with buyers. And in doing this, the developer could also garner lots of free publicity.

Katherine Salant can be contacted via her Web site,http://www.katherinesalant.com.

2006Katherine Salant Distributed by Inman News Features