Last Ditch

One of my goals for this growing season is to read more. I’ve been a great collector of books in the past but I have to confess that most of my gardening books sit alone on the shelf for much of the year. Apparently gardening book knowledge is not transferred by osmosis. I decided to put at least one easy win under my belt this weekend and picked up Forest Forensics, which I’ve owned for at least a year.

Although it’s more of a field guide to be used out in the world, rather than a book to be sat down and read, I really enjoyed just reading the whole thing cover to cover. Tom Wessels apparently wrote a more textbook like book called Reading the Forested Landscape but realized that it was pretty difficult to lug a whole textbook out into a forest and so created a reference guide that distilled down his main points. The book is based on reading New England forests, so doesn’t necessarily have a lot of applicability to us Pacific Northwesters but I believe many of the same principles would apply to anywhere with trees.

Essentially, Tom Wessels breaks down how to read a landscape into 4 or 5 questions, asked in a sequence that acts as a sort of flow chart to learn some basics of a landscape. I won’t detail all of those steps here but as an example, one of the questions is, are there stumps with flat tops (logging) or irregular (due to windfall)? If we assume there are stumps with flat tops, we can then find the smallest diameter stump with a flat top, count it’s rings, and make an educated guess about when the site was last logged. Neat, right?!

As a big fan of rambling shows like Time Team and easily-the-best-character Stuart Ainsworth, there’s so much about our landscapes that we can gather clues from that tell us about it’s history, natural and otherwise.

While I live in a city and the opportunities to read a forested landscape are a little bit limited, I’m excited to get into some forested areas soon to put some of my newly acquired knowledge to the test. Until I do, and maybe make a video about it, here’s Tom walking through how forest forensics looks in practice