Trafficking in Hot Trees
Published in: The Washington Post
Date: 5/17/2007
I don’t think Unitarians believe in hell, so the members of Mount Vernon Unitarian Church are denied the satisfaction of hoping that the people who stole their tree will burn in the hellfire of eternal damnation.
It was March 2, a Friday, when a truck towing a trailer and carrying a wood chipper pulled up in broad daylight to a street behind the Fairfax County church. At least four men got out. They set up traffic cones and went about their business, methodically cutting down a 60-foot paulownia tree that towered over a memorial garden by the side of the sanctuary. When they were done, they loaded the wood onto their trailer and drove off.
Plenty of people saw them, but everyone assumed the thieves had a legitimate reason to be there. Nearby maples and hollies were untouched. Only the paulownia — boasting a trunk 30 inches in diameter — was taken.
“We miss it,” said Alvin Macomber, the 79-year-old chairman of the church’s grounds committee, who showed me the scene of the crime yesterday.
After I mentioned paulownia trees in a recent column, I was inundated with mail on the subject. It fell into two categories:
1. The paulownia is a noxious, alien invader.
2. The paulownia drives men mad with desire.
Jessica Strother, an urban forester with Fairfax County, said the paulownia can grow in the most unforgiving of soils and is wickedly opportunistic. “It is a problem in that it invades natural areas and out-competes native plants and native trees for space,” she said.
To foresters such as Jessica, Paulownia tomentosa is nothing better than a woody snakehead — which is interesting because the other school considers it the most noble of trees, capable of producing not only beautiful purple blossoms but a handsome wood.
About that wood: Believe what you read on the Web and you’d think the only things paulownia wood can’t do are cure cancer and convert a 7-10 split. It’s lightweight, yet strong. It’s light in color and takes stain well. It’s fire-resistant, dries easily and doesn’t split. It’s a dessert topping and a floor wax . . .
Paulownia wood is supposedly prized in Japan, where it’s used for ornamental boxes and musical instruments. It’s said that when a girl is born in Japan, a paulownia tree is planted, and when she marries it’s cut down and made into her dowry chest.
Which sounds like a bunch of baloney to me. Where, exactly — in an island nation so desperate for space that people live in apartments the size of my garden shed — are all these trees being planted?
But there is enough of a perception that someone pays top dollar for this wood to inspire tree-nappers to risk jail to possess it.
“There’s a black market,” said David Drexler, proprietor of PaulowniaTrees.com, a Georgia company that sells paulownia seedlings to people who want to make money legally.
David said there are wood yards and sawmills that don’t ask questions when someone pulls up with a load of pilfered paulownia.
He spends a lot of his time convincing customers that much of what they’ve heard about paulownia isn’t true. These are the sort of people who in the past may have invested in ostrich farms or chinchilla ranches, dreamers and schemers who want to get in on the ground floor of a good thing. Yes, David tells them, the wood is good, but few trees have the tight grain the Japanese supposedly pay big bucks for.
Plantation-grown trees are harvested after about 10 years. “You can’t grow an old-growth tree in 10 years,” David said. “I get asked that: ‘How can I grow a tree with 50 rings in it?’ Well, it takes 50 years.”
Who wants to wait 50 years? Said David: “Everybody wants to get rich quick.”
I suppose there’s nothing quicker than stealing.
Alvin said that the Fairfax police officers didn’t seem all that interested in their missing tree. He said an officer questioned whether a crime had even taken place. If the church didn’t plant the tree to make money, then perhaps it wasn’t really theft.
But most of us plant trees not to make money but to make shade. We do it for the blossoms and the leaves. We do it to be reminded that we’re connected to the Earth. We do it to watch something grow that will outlast us.
If there’s any justice, the next time the thieving band of rustlers tries to cut down a tree, the tree will fight back. A big branch falling from about 60 feet ought to do the trick.