Half a Million and still growing
Our wood supplier in the north of Scotland has always been in forestry, we chanced upon each other at the Aviemore gift fair some 9 years ago. To our surprise he announced he has now supplied us with over half a million pieces of timber - that’s a hell of a lot of trees!
Not that we go round willy-nilly chopping them down; in the forestry world Silver Birch regenerates naturally and grows quickly (often referred to as a weed tree) and is an ideal nurse species for slower growing trees. Birch needs to be thinned and respaced to produce well formed mature specimens. This thinned material is left to rot, chipped or burnt as it has no real commercial value in the timber trade. They are really a natural waste product. The wood is collected and carefully graded into the appropriate quality and size from whittling sticks to blackbird calls before being cut, drilled and slowly air dried over 6 to 8 weeks to avoid cracking.
Each piece is then hand-crafted in our woodshed here in Selkirk to create anything from a Cuckoo to a Duck , Pencil or a Dibber before being packaged and sent around the world. So all in all the process from ‘tree to thee’ takes a minimum of 3 months and a lot of experience. Here’s looking forward to making the next half million…
