The Hundred-Acre Wood

Dive-bombed by deer flies and jabbed by blackberry thorns, I was in a rush to cut down the beech trees blocking the growth of some young white pines, a preferred species for my hundred-acre tree farm in Epping, New Hampshire. But after years of woods work, I know that “in a rush” and chainsaw make a dangerous mix. Managing a woodlot means lots of other things to do, so I decided to leave the beech for a cooler, less buggy day, opting instead to check on a stand of white pine a few hundred yards down a forest trail.

Just two years earlier, this green path was a beaten-down skidder trail over which powerful logging machines dragged grapple loads of trees to a landing where other powerful equipment cut and loaded them onto trucks to haul them to sawmills that would turn the good “saw logs” into lumber and the lower-quality remainder into wood chips for a nearby power plant.

During each of four major timber harvests on my land over three decades, I’ve been amazed by the hard work, skill, and team effort (well, most of the time) of the logging crews as they drop and drag trees marked for harvest with blue paint by my forester. Even for me it’s hard to envision such recent mechanical mayhem along this quiet stretch, where acres of regenerating pines glow a nearly iridescent green in the understory of their much taller parents.

Looking further back, it’s even harder to envision that I would ever cut any trees, let alone thousands of board feet of them. As a boy in Haverhill, Massachusetts, I spent whole afternoons in the woods surrounding Round Pond behind my parents’ house. Those tall pines became my buddies. And as the modern environmental movement picked up steam while I was at Tufts in the late 1960s, I certainly would have checked the tree hugger box.

That arboreal ardor helped shape my decision to buy some woodland of my own a few years after I graduated. I wanted ten acres or so to build a small house, preferably along a creek. I ended up with a much bigger parcel abutting the Pawtuckaway River, accessed by a narrow dirt road called Old Cart Path. Except for some isolated signs of cutting, most of the overgrown forest seemed largely untouched since the early 1900s, when it reclaimed cropland and pastures memorialized by stone walls stacked by the Folsom family, who owned and worked this land for centuries before me.

I found a spot to build my little house next to the creek. Unable to afford finished lumber, I hired a local logger to cut enough pine to give me rough-cut framing timber and for him to make some money. But his tree-cutting decisions were based more on what was most efficient for him, not necessarily best for the forest. Troubled by how the land looked after the job, I sought advice from the forester for the county extension service. Walking the land with me, he offered my first real lesson in how to see the trees for the forest. He noted areas where too many or the wrong trees were cut and others where the land and surrounding forest were unnecessarily damaged. Moving deeper into the woods, he pointed out sections that looked nicely dark and deep, but were not healthy. Struggling for room to grow, the trees were crooked and scrawny, with bare lower branches. Too many trees means too little light reaching the forest floor to stimulate the growth of seeds and acorns. Given the soils and other characteristics of my land, he suggested I encourage more economically valuable species such as oak and white pine to balance the abundance of hemlock, maple, and other attractive but less marketable trees.

So while I got my two-by-sixes for my house from that first cut, I also got a lesson: Much as I thought I cared for my woods, I didn’t really have a clue about how to properly manage them.

I hired a forester, aptly named Chip Chapman, to develop a forest management plan. These plans are the blueprint for smart and sustainable woodland practices. They describe the land’s current condition, such as soil types, vernal pools, topography, and drainage patterns. They note special historic, natural, or other features—my plan marks the locations of a half dozen trees flagged for their size or age—as well as identify rare and endangered species and recommend best practices to follow.

Based on the plan, he oversaw two timber harvests in the mid-1990s. His job was to mark trees, contract with the crews, and oversee the work. My job was to observe but keep out of the way. Rather than taking out and profiting from good trees, the goal of these first operations was to thin out overcrowded sections—to remove low-quality trees, leaving behind good ones to keep growing and to seed healthy offspring that would now have room to thrive in newly created open patches.

The land can look badly scarred after a timber harvest. Standing trees get snapped off or dinged by equipment. Piles of branches and other woody debris known as slash dot the woods. Rutted and often muddy logging runs leave some parts of the land nearly unrecognizable. This battered appearance can deter nervous landowners from even thinking about logging their property—I was a bit overwhelmed during my first cut—but it doesn’t take long for the woods to recover, for the mud and gouges to disappear, and for rabbits and other wildlife to find homes in the slash, which decomposes to replenish the soil.

Chip suggested I seek tree farm certification. The American Tree Farm System was begun in Washington State by the Weyerhaeuser Company in the 1940s to demonstrate sustainable forest management and forest fire control. Until the early 1900s, when scientific forest management was introduced in this country, most forest land in the eastern United States was cleared of trees time and again ever since European colonization. The tree farm system was a program for private forest landowners to mimic sustainable forestry being done on federal and industrial lands. When he began inspecting tree farms in 1980, Fred Borman, the forestry field specialist for the University of New Hampshire extension service, told me recently, most were just growing Christmas trees. “But,” he said, “others were owned by families who wanted to do the right thing by their woodlands.”

Tree farm certification in New Hampshire requires, among other things, at least ten acres (check), a written management plan (check), and “commitment to harvesting forest products in a silviculturally sound manner” (check, I hoped). After filing the paperwork and an on-the-land inspection, I was approved in 1999. The green Certified Tree Farm sign, its four edges declaring the program’s goals of Wildlife, Recreation, Wood, and Water, is proudly posted at the entry to my woodland.

Fred has walked my land often as he reviews my improvement efforts, such as cutting out those beech trees to free up the pine. One day, we were walking a section through which I’ve meandered countless times. I thought I knew my woods pretty well, but Fred’s trained eye was struck by a pitch pine I’d barely noticed. He suggested I point it out to Kevin Martin, an Epping boat builder and volunteer for the New Hampshire Register of Big Trees. Last year, Kevin certified that pitch pine, with its ninety-foot height and seventy-three-inch circumference, as “the largest reported specimen of its species” growing in Rockingham County. My land hosts a second certified big tree, a sweet birch with a circumference of nearly twelve feet growing around a granite ledge. We call this one “Super Tree.”

It’s been more than forty years since I first fought an army of mosquitoes to visit this land. It’s taken that long, with a lot of help from my current forester, Charles Moreno, and others, to get these woods into a condition that feels right every day. Former logging runs now form a trail network across the property. White pine and other species are thriving, to be harvested someday by me or some successor to keep up with the management plan (and to help pay the hefty New Hampshire property tax). Mighty white oaks shed acorns to feed deer and other wildlife, who find winter protection in the shelter of thick hemlocks. Clear-cut patches yield new growth that provides food and building materials for beavers, who create ponds and wetlands that benefit two- and four-legged creatures alike. And I’m doing my small part to fight climate change: an acre of trees absorbs as much CO2 in a year as a car emits in 26,000 miles of driving.

At about the same time as my lot became a tree farm, I granted a conservation easement on most of the property to a land trust, protecting the land from development. Well-managed forestry work is still permitted, even encouraged.

I don’t know who will own these woods after I become compost, but I hope they do as well for me as I hope I have done for the owner before me, Mary Folsom Blair. She was a Quaker, a one-room-school teacher, and a feminist and conservationist long before such terms were popular. She also kept amazing journals I managed to corral over several decades. “Oh, the pink and white beauties half hidden in the leaves, the brawling stream, the soft breeze, the balmy air,” she wrote in a 1908 entry. “Then the next day by the meadow dam, looking up at the blue sky from the foot of the pines. It is a long look up to those pines. How they swing and sway so gracefully when the wind blows. And Macduff and Box, the collies, on guard at head and feet. Such moments are worth living for.”

I’m pretty sure I know exactly the place where she and her dogs were sitting. The meadow is now a beaver pond. Tall pines still abound. May they forever swing and sway.

Phil Primack, A70, is a freelance editor and writer in Medford, Massachusetts.