Pine

Here is a piece I will be making shortly - a tool chest for my next book. This one was made from Home Depot white pine.

Pine like this is lightweight and strong. Oak would be twice the weight yet not twice as strong and too heavy to lift of course.

There are of course many types of pines that grow in different regions around the world, sadly , most consider pines, spruces and firs to be cheap woods; cheap in quality, cheap in a trashy way and of course it tends to be cheaper than hardwoods. Funny how perspectives change. In the same way things we trash become undervalued to the same level we demoralize people and life itself, the work we do the people we become over familiar with, how we undervalue what was once revered and honoured, honest and good. In a culture where absolutes are condemned I find myself declaring that many things past should be brought back and returned to their rightful places amongst men. Virtue is frowned upon and boundaries man once knew by relationship are disregarded. In times past we harvested wood with care and concern. A man selected the tree from which to carve and shape his work because he knew his tree and kept it until it was the size he needed. Once the axe (ax USA) fell the tree died and he knew that in his limited sphere existing on the earth that he could not regrow that tree. He valued what he had and cared about where he lived and his harvest was the tree. Unlike corn and wheat, genetically modified for speed growth and disease resistance, that man with the tree could not alter what he had seen and watched grow during is life. It was local. He possessed what he could see and cared for what he saw. When you see a tree on your land and remove that tree the land changes and things are permanently different. Until you have severed trees from their root, and I have severed hundreds if not thousands in my lifetime working wood, you cannot possibly understand what I am talking of.

There is nothing cheap about pine if you have worked its substance as I have for near 50 years. It’s quite lovely. A gentle wood, undervalued, robbed of its worth and even raped for want of another word. So disadvantaged has this would become, we could not recognise that boxes and cupboards by the millions have protected our possessions for centuries and held with simple dovetails of every shape and size imaginable.

It was never the pine that was cheap, it was we who cheapened it by what we did to and by how we used it. Stick-frame house, poorly made mass-made goods, wafer board in OSB and chipboard and so on. People ask me what is my favourite wood to work with. I tell them pine. From pine I made my first doors and window frames as an apprentice of 15. Staircases and beds, one of my houses in the US and most of my tool chests through the years. Ho about this; Pine makes the very best workbench bar none! It’s actually traditional. Poor folks made their furniture from it and the antique shops throughout Britain stock more pine existing from two hundred years ago than any other wood. Imagine!

Paul Sellers loves pine. It makes sense, it’s lovely to work, to smell, to rely on. It’s strong, resilient, attractive, stable, dependable, grows well. I hate to see how we resent what we use up and throw out in our disgust.

Care about what you do and how you work with what you have. The longleaf pine of North America now stand in a few thousand acres when millions once covered vast tracts of virgin forest. The virgin was raped, left distressed and abandoned and the earth knew its loss. The longleaf (pinus palustris) will never return. I have thankfully worked its substance too, from the beams bulldozed from abandoned warehouses around the USA and Europe. It was a wonderful, wonderful resource.