Rustic Furniture

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Over the decades I've made scores of end tables and coffee tables, chairs, couches, love seats, and picture frames. I've even made an eightfoot-tall hat rack from a red cedar pole after I found a four-point half-rack of deer antlers in the woods, though I've never even worn a felt hat. In deference to tradition, I set one of the kid's ratty old teddy bears in a sitting position, holding on with one paw and looking down quizzical-Pooh bear-like from an upper branch.

I also left six inches of most of the other branches. There were over 20 hangers sticking out and—set in a big washtub to catch the drippings—the stand made a great boot, mitten, and snowsuit drier for little kids.

If the daily news has you in a Gothic frame of mind, go timber-cruising for the rustic-grotesque and hark back to the earliest rustic period. Woody old lilac bushes are gnarled and contorted and most home owners are happy to let you cut them out (you'll rejuvenate the bushes). Roots of mountain laurel, rhododendron, and magnolia are naturally grotesque. Most established woodlands will contain exposed roots of wind-uprooted trees, trunks that are snow or storm broken and regrown crooked (usually at the baseoffering you natural table feet, settee arms; and mote) or deformed by burls and knots, plus the convoluted stems of wild grape and bittersweet vines that can be a foot thick at the base and describe marvelous loops and curves as they climb.

If you fancy more Enlightened, conventional looking furniture that is rustic made but not all that rustic looking, get some two-foot-thick chunks of dry, straightgrained, and good-splitting white oak. Take out your riving froe, shaving horse, draw knife, and your dog-eared copy of The Foxfire Book (the first and best in the series). Starting on p. 128, old-time Georgia mountaineer Lon Reid shows how to build a slat-backed chair from cedar splints using hand tools. Roy Underhill does the same from a different perspective in chapter 6 of The Woodwright's Shop (also the title of the TV-associated book series).

Gathering Wood

The best twig furniture is made from opportunistic young saplings that naturally take over any stretch of bare ground that isn't mowed or plowed twice a year. They are seldom desirable for man's purpose and they are redundant a thousand times for nature's. The land and sun space occupied by a single mature forest tree once hosted a thousand seedlings in a dozen speciesall eventually crowded or shaded out or poisoned. Once established, trees such as black walnut dose the soil with a natural herbicide to discourage competition.

The best location for hardwood saplings is a well-drained lot recently burned over or cleared but abandoned for several years. The newly-cleared land will be choked with a random variety of first-growth trees (poplar, aspen or alder, black cherry, the birches) growing close together, straight and easy to glean. An older woods will contain a scattering of young second- or terminalgrowth trees (maple, oak, evergreens), but sticks will not be as straight as they grow in full sun, often providing you with interesting crooks.

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