Here is a short description of the green woodworking process:

My work involves green woodworking in the Swedish style, using traditional tools to make bowls and spoons from deciduous hardwoods.  Logs and limbs that come directly from a living tree have moisture in them, which makes even the hardest woods softer and easier to work.  After an initial shaping with hatchet, adze, gouges, and knives, I set the bowl or spoon aside to dry for two weeks to two months, depending on the project and the weather.  As the wood dries, it hardens.  When dry, I give the object its final shape with gouges and knives.  An important characteristic of the Swedish spoon style includes narrowing the handle just above the bowl and reinforcing the narrow spot by adding thickness beneath.  This adds an interesting curvature and delicate look to spoons.  A distinctive feature of the Swedish bowl style includes bark-up bowls with high handles and sides that arch from end to end naturally and gracefully.  Both bowls and spoons receive a final decorative carving, adding splendor to everyday objects.

A discussion of the joys of the green woodworking process is below:

The Existential Pleasures of Green Woodworking, Duane Olson

            When you split a greenwood limb freshly cut from a live tree, it sounds a bit like splitting a watermelon with a knife.  It’s more juicy slurp than dull thud.  Initially, when I heard about the idea of working with wood still full of moisture, I was incredulous.  How could you do it since sap is so sticky?  It’s true that pine sap is sticky, but green woodworkers don’t use pine and mostly avoid conifers altogether.  They use deciduous hardwoods whose sap is not sticky, or oily or greasy for that matter.  You can work for hours with greenwood – splitting, sawing, carving – and never feel like your hands are covered with anything.

            Why work wood when it is green rather than waiting for it to dry?  First, because wood that has moisture in it is softer than dried wood.  A tree standing in the forest is softer than the same tree cut into boards and dried in the lumber yard.  A tree must be strong to defy gravity and reach toward the sun, but it also needs some flexibility to withstand the horizontal forces of the wind that assail it.  The moisture running through the wood fibers both makes possible the photosynthetic life and growth of the tree, and gives the tree enough flexing capacity to withstand the normal weather of the place to which it is adapted.  Because even the hardest hardwoods are softer when they come right from the tree, it is easier for the green woodworker to shape them with the traditional edge tools of hatchet, adze, gouge, and knife.

            Another major reason to work wood when it is green is because limbs and logs tend to split as they dry.  Working them green makes use of them before they split.  A log with moisture in it is larger than one without moisture because water expands the tree fibers.  A tree standing in the forest full of water is wider than that same tree having fallen down with the moisture leeched out of it.  If a log lost its moisture at the same rate everywhere, it would shrink uniformly and not split.  However, cut from its roots and shoots, a log will lose moisture at a faster rate on the outside than on the protected inside, and at a much faster rate where it is cut than where it is not cut, as moisture rushes out of the exposed fibers at the place of the cut.  This means every log suffers stresses as it dries: it shrinks more on the outside than the inside and on its cut ends than the middle.  It relieves these stresses by splitting, or what woodworkers call “checking.”  On soft woods, the checks may be small, but harder woods may crack to the center of the log in multiple places uncontrollably.  The green woodworker can compensate for this on some level by covering the cut ends of a log with wax or paint and leaving the bark on the log to slow down the drying.  Even this, though, has limits.  If you are not going to cut the log into boards and control the drying, you need to make use of the log while it is still green and has not yet split.  If you can get your project roughed out and thinly layered with a lot of exposed end grain, it has a chance to dry without major stresses and without checking.  With care, you can use the entire width of the log, free of splits.

The Process

Every greenwood project starts by splitting the log or limb in half, because the center of every log or branch contains the earliest and weakest growth called the pith or juvenile wood.  In its first years, a young tree pushes its stem up and roots down in exuberance, going all out to survive in whatever environment it finds itself.  But being close to the ground in the forest means facing a variety of hazards.  Animals step on the sapling, brush against it, and eat parts of it.  The limbs and leaves of mature trees fall on it.  The young sprout has to grow fast and it must be flexible to withstand the vagaries of forest life close to the ground.  The price of that sinewy youthfulness is that the early wood fiber is not durable.  It is only after the tree is a few years old that it starts to stand with unbending willfulness.  To do this, it puts on durable fibers running vertically from root to branch, while the weak juvenile wood remains locked inside the ever expanding trunk.  As a first task, the green woodworker splits the log and removes the pith.  If you don’t, and you try to incorporate the pith into your project, it will split at that weak spot as it dries. 

Because the juvenile wood at the center of a limb or log is weak, it actually makes the splitting process easier.  For big logs, all you need to do is line up your wedges so they cross the visible pith in the center and pound them in.  Almost invariably, the split will follow the weak spot from top to bottom.  Many spoons are made from crooks in trees:  curved limbs, or the spot where a branch comes out of the trunk.  Even on a curved limb, if you aim for the pith at the center of the branch, pounding your hatchet on the side of a limb with a maul, the branch will almost always split along the curve, following the pith.

Traditional woodworking begins with a trip to the lumber yard to select the labeled species of milled and dried boards fit for the project.  Green woodworking begins elsewhere, usually with serendipity.  A large branch is blown down from a tree in the yard.  You hear a chainsaw taking down a tree in the neighborhood, or a friend calls to say one is being taken down in their part of town.  You call the local arborist, asking what he has new on his wood pile.  One of our Midwestern thunderstorms blows through town, felling some of the limbs and trunks of the trees that grace it.  Unexpected gifts are suddenly at hand.  It’s Christmas in July.  Out of tragedy comes treasure.

To be a green woodworker, you must recognize treasure when you see it.  While I am not a mushroom hunter, I am told by those who are that when you begin, you are as likely to step on a mushroom as you are to see it.  It’s only when you learn how to look that you can see the mushrooms emerge from the clutter of the forest floor.  So it is with green woodworking.  In the systematic dismantling of a large tree by a professional, or the frantic group effort to clear the messy aftermath of a storm, there are morels standing out of the clutter ready to be picked.  Species need to be identified on the spot with an understanding of the usefulness of differing hardwood species to the variety of green woodworking projects.  The health of the tree and the character of its growth need quick analysis.  Does it have accessible, pest-free, rot-free, knot-free, straight logs fit for making bowls?  Where are the rightly shaped crooks for spoons?  Logs and limbs are selected and brought to the shop and the project begins.

Woodworking Improvisation

            The first thing you notice when you split a green limb or log is the aroma.  Moisture permeates all parts of the wood, and it smells.  Every tree species has its own odor. You can pick up these smells in a dulled form in traditional woodworking by cutting dried boards with a saw, but with green woodworking the smell greets you in its raw form the moment of the split and remains throughout the process.  No northern hardwood I have found has a sweeter smell than black cherry, and it is a delight to think that these trees that often look weak in the forest with their skinny arching limbs next to the muscled oaks and hickories, bear this inner sweetness.  You would think sugar maples would smell like maple syrup, but to me they smell like grass with only a slightly sweet overtone.  Birch smells about the same, though not as strong.  More than any other tree, white oak smells like the earth it grows in.  Black walnut smells like earth too, but deep rich earth, deep loam.  The first time I split a catalpa, its black pepper smell shocked me.  As I worked it, I had to take breaks at times because the smell was so strong.  The smell of some trees borders on the unpalatable.  The first time I split red elm, I figured it had to be unusable because it smelled bad.  Not so.  And as I got used to it, I liked the smell.  Ditto for black locust.  Then there’s osage orange.  The ugliest tree in the forest that will grow in the muck where most other trees won’t grow has the most pleasing earthy, sweet, citrus smell, and the most beautiful yellow wood imaginable. 

            The log itself is a serendipitous gift of grace.  Turning it into a product is a process layered with chance.  Flex and change are the norm.  There is no preordained movement from measurements for a project carefully drawn on the drafting board, to their transference to actual boards, to ripping and crosscutting within narrow tolerances.  Instead, a plan emerges for the select log, avoiding what appears to be known hazards.  In carrying it out, previously unknown hazards appear along with previously unseen possibilities.  A new plan announces itself and a new direction is taken, though it will be constantly questioned and perhaps again reimagined as the process continues.  This doesn’t mean the green woodworking process is devoid of rules, goals, or standards.  There are best practices to follow and things to avoid at all costs.  But there is no calculated predestination from idea to product.  It is improv at the log from creation to decoration.  It is jazz, not classical.  Like all improv, there are nights where you’re not that good; you’re just off.  Sometimes the material will have the flex to overcome your mistakes and take you in a new direction.  Sometimes, you pour an enormous amount of sweat into a piece of firewood.  But the more you do improv, the more you find your groove and something dependable, if not entirely predictable, begins to occur.

            Every project begins with an interrogation of the log.  The looming question: Where are the knots?  A knot is where branch met trunk.  Branches are the trees horizontal derring-do.  The trunk defies gravity by going up but the branch that comes from it does the seemingly miraculous, suspending itself horizontally over nothing.  In order to suspend from the trunk, the place of intersection needs to harden: thus, the knot.  Such suspension would also not be possible without wood fiber encircling and swirling around the intersection before moving both out the branch and up the trunk.

            Knots create a conundrum.  While traditional woodworking usually avoids them, they can add interest.  People who build furniture with slabs often embrace them, since they display the realness of the tree in the way a board stripped of them does not.  A green woodworker also wants the legacy of the wood to show in the product, so having knots and defects is not necessarily defective.  And yet, knots dry differently than the rest of the piece.  They can split, fall out, or crack the wood around them.  And with their swirling grain, they can be nearly impossible to work with hand tools.  Usually big knots are avoided for these reasons. 

Often, the knots are all on one side of the log or limb, the side that was facing the sun.  You can split them out and use the shade half of the log.  But knots are tricky.  As a tree grows, it will often shed lower branches for newer upper ones.  While a branch may be shed, the knot remains in the trunk and eventually the tree grows straight fibers around it.  Working a log means going back in time, passing through the years of life of the tree expressed in its rings.  Going back in time often means finding internally embedded knots or bark.  There may be a year or two where the tree struggled and barely grew, leaving a darker ring.  There may have been some external damage to the tree at one time that is revealed in internal streaks or alterations in the grain.  Is the variation a beautiful addition that should be incorporated into the plan?  Is it something that should be removed, requiring the plan to be tweaked?  Much of green woodworking involves the unknown and chance.  With it, you must try to dance.

Green Bowl-Making  

            After splitting a log, the first and most important decision a green bowl-maker must make is whether to orient the future bowl with the pith up and bark down, or vice versa.  A pith up and bark down bowl is a logical choice and most traditional bowls follow this norm.  If you flatten the bark area for a base, the log naturally curves so it is wider at the split.  Scoop out the middle and you’ve got a bowl.  Long narrow versions of these kinds of bowls are called dough bowls because they were used to knead and rise dough.  In the days before slick Formica countertops, it was easier to wash and clean a bowl for breadmaking than the entire cabinet.  Many design opportunities present themselves to this bowl form.

            The other alternative, pith down and bark up, is counter-intuitive.  It’s sometimes called the Swedish bowl style because it was popularized there, and, at least in the modern period, its form is traceable to a single artist named Bengt Lidstrom who blew the lid off the bowl-making form.  Once you see the possibilities in bark up bowls, they are irresistible.  Multiple features of these bowls stand out, including sweeping curves with carving possibilities on the bowl sides, high handles on the ends that also present carving opportunities, and upward exposure of the sapwood-heartwood contrast along with layers of rings running back in time in the vision of the bowl from top to bottom.

Every year as a tree grows, it adds a new layer of fiber over the old layers, forming the progressive rings you see on a trunk when a tree is cut down.  The tree carries water from root to branch on the successive external layers.  Each year, as the tree adds a new layer of sap-carrying fiber, an old layer of fiber passes to the internal part of the tree, ceases carrying sap, and simply provides strength.  The internal layers of fiber are called the heartwood of a tree and the external layers the sapwood.  They are equal in strength, but depending on the tree species, the heartwood and sapwood can display variation in color.  Usually, the sapwood is lighter than the heartwood and it will remain that way even after it dries.  The most dramatic sapwood/heartwood contrasts in popular green woodworking trees are in cherry and black walnut, though many other wood types contain hues of interesting divergence.  If you orient the bowl with the bark up, the sapwood surrounds the entire top, including the handles.  It is only as your eye moves into the bowl itself the progressive layers of heartwood emerge.

Spoons and Crooks

The metal spoons in your drawer are shaped for optimal use.  The arched handle is meant to rest easily between thumb and forefinger, and when it rests there, the front of the spoon bowl is tilted upward, with the back tilted down.  With the bowl so tilted, the user can more easily scoop material into it.  It’s an ingenious design and all it requires is that the bowl and handle of the spoon be tilted at different angles from each other. 

A green woodworker could duplicate this design from a straight limb, but since wood fibers run straight through the limb, making a spoon with bowl and handle at different angles would mean there are no continuous wood fibers running from the tip of the handle to the tip of the bowl.  Either the bowl or the handle would have fiber running at odds with it.  Strands of fiber are what gives strength to wood.  They are the bones of the tree, running up and down the trunk and out through every limb allowing the tree to defy gravity and stand.  As every green woodworker knows, no tree limb is perfectly straight.  There are natural curves in them and sometimes these curves are relatively sharp in the log.  Plus, when branches arch from a tree, the fibers move continuously from trunk to branch to hold up the branch.  These curves or crooks provide an opportunity to make a spoon with bowl and handle at differing angles but with fibers running continuously from one to the other.  Spoons made in this way can be both thin and strong, the goal of every spoon-maker.  Thinness allows for optimal ease of use while strength speaks for itself.

Branches come off the tree trunk at different angles, and offer possibilities for spoons with greater or lesser bowl angles.  A branch that emerges at 90 degrees from the trunk makes a ladle, while one that is 30 degrees makes a great sauté spoon.  The natural growth in the tree determines the spoon type.  Branches also have sapwood-heartwood contrasts that can be incorporated into the spoon, adding interest and beauty.

Transformation to Beauty and Usefulness

            There’s something magical about starting with a log and ending up with a beautiful, functional object crafted with only your hands and a limited number of tools made to fit in them.  I’ve tried using power tools to make bowls and spoons, but in my experience, they separate the maker from the material.  The tools are loud, and using them requires dressing in protective gear, including a face shield.  The whirring blades tear at the wood and you lose the feel of grain orientation and sense of the distinctive character of the piece as it opens before you.  A well-made, well-honed hand tool feels like an extension of the body.  In fact, in order to maximize control with hatchet and adze, I often imagine them as extensions of my body so that just as I can reach out with my hand and touch something precisely where and how I desire, I want to be able to do the same with the edge blades of the tools.  There are techniques that must be learned for the proper use of each tool, but once they are, the tools become remarkably efficient.  This does not mean the process is easy.  Every user needs to build skill, along with muscle and callouses, to use the tools properly.

It’s hard to tell how much the draw of green woodworking is owing to a quirk of personality.  I was nearly 60 years old when I finally understood the range of possibilities involved in green woodworking, and when I did, I knew my life as a woodworker had permanently changed.  I didn’t give up traditional woodworking, but my central zeal shifted to something new.

What is it about green woodworking that so appeals?  Every woodworker I know loves trees and understands that the more you know about them, the better and more distinctive your woodworking can become.  Yet traditional woodworking begins with boards, already cut and dried, coming from trees that come from somewhere else.  Green woodworking takes you closer to the tree.  It begins with a log or limb, bark still attached.  And the tree is local.  It is from the back yard or down the street.  It has the terroir of your place.

Once you begin green woodworking, your experience with trees changes.  The catalpa in the park is no longer merely that big-leafed tree with beautiful white flowers in the spring, although it is still that.  Now, you know how it smells on the inside.  You know its density, and how surprisingly light its wood is.  You know the color of its sapwood and how thin a layer of sapwood it bears.  You know the way it responds to your tools and how easy it is to shave thin slices from it.  You know how beautiful the dark layers of its porous rings are against the bronze background of the slower growth, and how spectacular they look in a bark-up bowl.  In the Genesis story, the primal man gives names to all of the plants and animals, and naming is a connection.  Instead of a vague undefined landscape, now, there is this tree, this bush, and this creature with these features that bears this name.  Green woodworking takes you back to something like that original naming.  You encounter live trees that aren’t just boards in a store of a certain quality but fellow living beings making their way in the world, reaching to the sun, struggling against the weather, becoming who they are.  Each bears its own name.  Each is a member of a species.  Each is a distinct individual.  The properties of the whole open for you as you slowly work and shape it with your hands.

The act of green woodworking is a relentless taking away.  You begin with a log, which you split, and, because of the knots on one side, use only half.  In making a bowl or spoon, you remove at least 90% of what remains, as you coax from the crude log something delicate-looking and yet strong.  In doing this, everything but that meager 10% ends up as chips on the floor.  Hand-made mulch.  But what remains reflects the whole.  The crook in the spoon was in the tree.  The outside of a bark-up bowl reveals the shape of the log from which it came.  The fiber that was in the tree and now runs from end to end of spoon or bowl yields remarkable strength.  The entire process is the distillation of a possibility, a possibility that you slowly, determinedly, allow to take shape in dialogue with the wood.  What was destined for the burn pile now brings joy to the mundane with its combination of beauty and functionality.  Instead of instantly returning to the ground, a slice of life has been brought in from the wild, and it feels good to hold it in your hands as you make plans for dinner.