Seeds Sown in Hope Grow on Every Front

Today was another busy day. My square checked my work relentlessly and legalistically. Seeds fell from the Giant Sequoia cone onto my benchtop and I wondered how a tree 50-80-meters high could grow from so small a seed.

This small section of European redwood is 124 years old this year; there’s 2 3/4” of growth from its centre of origin to the outside of the sapwood. 1890 since its seed fell to the earth and started searching through soil to tap into the forest floor somewhere inside Northern Europe. How people can despise pine I cannot know. This grain grows in dense, tightly formed rings and I stop myself from work at my bench to look at the life there. Common pine. Should I treat it without respect. Friends have asked me to make caskets from this wood and when they died I dovetailed the corners as I would a well-made box of any kind. The pine wood returns to the earth as do the friends I lost over the years. The wooden handles and the calico lining seem fitting somehow. Unpretentious. The Sequoiadendron giganteum has tiny seeds .5mm thick, 3.5mm across and 4.5mm long (1/64” x 5/32” x 3/16”). The seeds lie inside cracks in cones that have beautiful markings and in the seed itself there is crimson speckling few if any ever see.

My class is going well. We start another project tomorrow and we talk about many things related to wood. We sharpen planes and chisels of course and when we begin working in oak we cover scrapers and planing techniques for oak that we must at least consider. The dovetails came out really nice. Not mine, theirs. Mine came out fine too, but I have made a few now, many hundreds at least. Phil’s workbench stool is almost done and soon John will start his drawers for the tool chest. They do many other things too, don’t forget. My own tool chest is glued up and the top and bottom panels with the raised panels is ready to glue up tomorrow so I too will be starting drawers. I also have a another bookcase to build, so I will do that one this week too. Lots going on.

We don’t think about it much, not enough anyway, but life is all about seed and growth, death, birth, regeneration. We should dwell on life more than we do. That seed is something else when you think about it. Imagine, 280 feet into the sky! How about that!