For environmental historian Brian Donahue and his wife Faith Rand, building a home from wood harvested on their Massachusetts farm represented a small step in mending the broken relationship between our woodlands and our wood. Donahue’s Slow Wood: Greener Building from Local Forests not only recounts the silvicultural, design, and construction processes of a single house but also tells the story of how Americans have managed our forests and built and heated our homes since before colonization. Embedded in this book that is parts memoir, history, how-to manual, and manifesto are calls to restore to the heart of conservation a hands-on, working relationship with nature. While also maintaining support for wild, unmanaged places to be set aside, Donahue argues that harvesting and building with wood can foster biodiversity, protect watersheds, sequester carbon, and rebuild rural communities. “We can have our woods,” he writes, “and cut them, too.”
Donahue and Rand knew they wanted a timber frame house built from a well-matched mix of wood types cut from their own woodlot. They wanted the house “to express the landscape not just in its design and setting, but in the very stuff from which it was made, inside and out.” They would start with what they took from the woods, in a “worst first” management style as part of a larger improvement thinning, and work back toward the house’s design. One of their first decisions was to use hemlock for the frame, rather than the more usual framing woods of pine or oak. In contrast to its ecological value along a nearby stream, hemlock on the drier hillside was susceptible to the invasive hemlock wooly adelgid, and the slow-growing tree of low-grade lumber could crowd out other species of monetary value in the woodlot being managed for timber. When the family sold pine to pay for the harvest and kept the hemlock for the frame, subflooring, and doors, they affirmed a fundamental truth of building with “slow wood”: “in the right hands, low-grade wood can make a high-grade house.” When the hemlock frame needed a complementary accent for its curved braces, Donahue scoured the woods and found another opportunity for low grading: low-diameter, crooked black cherries, ripe for removal.
Donahue had previously overlooked black birch for construction use but, faced with its abundance, came to appreciate its tight grains, hardness, and how well its creamy yellow sapwood and rich, reddish brown heartwood blended with the exposed hemlock timbers and cherry bracing. In “Chapter Six: Birch Floor,” excerpted here, Donahue describes how black birch ultimately appeared on almost every surface in the house’s final makeup. With the tree gaining a more prominent foothold in northeastern forests this century, Donahue and Rand’s selection of it may foretell its more widespread use in the region. ─ Jackson Saul
Black birch is mostly used for flooring, although it isn’t generally as highly regarded as oak, maple, or cherry. But when Faith and I started scrolling through on-line galleries of timber frame houses, we chanced upon a few pictures of a nice hemlock frame that had birch floors and kitchen cabinets. We liked the look of that birch, it paired beautifully with the hemlock, and we had lots of it in our woodlot. Indeed, the older generation of birch on the hill had mostly reached full size and been overtaken by the slowpoke oaks, so it was time for a large part of it to be removed. Our forester Lincoln Fish had marked almost fifteen thousand feet of black birch as part of our first low-grade harvest. Deciding on birch for our floors was actually the first house decision we made, and discovering that it went nicely with hemlock reinforced our inclination to use hemlock for the frame. Black birch goes just as well with black cherry – in fact, it is a perfect bridge in tone between cherry and hemlock – but we hadn’t discovered that yet.
Fifteen thousand feet of birch was way more than we needed, so we struck a deal with the Massachusetts Woodland Cooperative, a network of Forest Stewardship Council – certified forest owners and processors of value-added wood products which we had joined. In the fall of 2010, we trucked all the birch saw logs that our logger Ed Klaus had cut to David Lashway of Highland Community Lumber, to be custom sawed for flooring. This was our first real step toward generating materials for the house, before anything else was built or even designed, and it set the tone for what was to follow. It was exciting to visit David’s mill and see those stacks of fresh, rough birch boards, before they went off to the kiln. It made us feel like the house was really going to happen. We then sold the best of that birch to the coop and kept the worst for our own floor. Same old low-grade Yankee logic: step one: cut the worst first. Step two: sell the best of what you cut, keep the rest to build your house. This meant we sold the selects with the fewest knots and held onto the more colorful “character wood,” appropriately enough because as Yankees we believe that frugality builds character. What better place to flaunt your parsimony than underfoot?
Even after the sale to the coop we had more birch than we needed for floorboards. We had the rough-cut birch trucked from the kiln to Tony Mason the following year, who milled most of it for our flooring and set the rest aside. I hauled it all home. The finish flooring went straight to the house, which by then had its frame and sheathing up, its roof on, and its hemlock subflooring down. The unmilled rough birch we stacked in the barn to wait and see what would happen next. That winter, once the floors were all laid, the interior walls built, and the drywall up and painted, we decided to use the extra birch for baseboard and trim. Our carpenter Toby Briggs picked through the pile and worked up what he liked best in his shop. He fitted particularly interesting pieces of trim where their colors and grain echoed the figure of adjacent cherry braces, and then waited for us to notice. We did – or at least assured him we had once he dropped a hint. The oiled birch is a warm brown, shading on the sapwood side toward yellow and on the heartwood side toward red – more muted in tone than the brighter polyurethaned birch floor. Toby used richer, redder cherry for the window sills, including the three large inside openings with sliding hemlock doors that look out onto the living room on both floors. Those wide cherry sills are among the prettiest boards in the house, set off by hemlock and birch.
I don’t remember Toby mentioning these ideas to us beforehand, although he might have. In my memory, the cherry sills just magically appeared when the trim went up. So the house worked out its final form as the plans and frame passed from Tom Chalmers (the architect) and Dave Bowman and Neil Godden (the framers) to Toby and his crew to be filled in, an interplay among hemlock, cherry, and black birch – with a small walk-on part for sugar maple, which will be coming up next. As I said, this was not a project where a single mastermind drew up the plans and called out all the details for mute craftsmen to execute with their subservient hands. Instead, many creative minds and hands built the house piece by piece, adding interesting features along the way, much as the forest itself grows and presents its gifts to us.
From early on, we had in mind that we could use birch for kitchen and bathroom cabinets. Toby started that project but then suggested we hire Bryan Dolan, a carpenter on his crew who ran a woodworking business on the side. What Bryan did with that black birch was something to behold. All the cabinet doors have panels that are book-matched, often with dark red knots surrounded by swirling grain – a doubling that makes it look as if a dozen rather skeptical owls are peering out from their burrows over the refrigerator and under the counters. The largest, eye-level cupboard doors have long, twisting rivers of fine grain with subtle back eddies – who knew such intricate figure was hidden inside the rough birch boards squirreled away in our barn?
Sometimes when I look at the work these guys did, I think it’s as if they used exotic tropical hardwoods rather than our own birch, cherry, and maple. But in truth, this hidden beauty is in the woods all around us, if we know where to look for it and how to reveal it. It is the internal manifestation of the lives of trees that have been standing in the sun and wind and have developed the character to show for it. We can harvest those trees to showcase it, and the woods will keep growing more for us, until the end of time. That is the other, less celebrated miracle that could come from our vaunted “explosion of green” – the restoration of local artistic traditions that were once commonly practiced and enjoyed.
Black birch came into our house on the floor, just as its seeds carpet the forest in the spring. From there it popped up as the baseboard against every wall, like solid ranks of tiny seedlings. Then, when we gave it room to grow, birch shot up around the doorways and leapt from there to the windows. It climbed the walls and reached its fullest expression as a subcanopy codominant, in the form of cabinets that almost touch the kitchen ceiling. That sweet birch is one unassuming but opportunistic little species. There is more of it lurking out there in the woods than you might think, and that is a good thing.