Mother's Rustic Pergola
(Page 3 of 13)
February/March 1998
By the Mother Earth News staff
We don't live in cedar country; eastern red cedar doesn't grow as far north, nor eastern white cedar as far south as our place. Young white pine, balsam fir, spruce, and hemlock are too soft and whippy for small-scale rustic structures. Besides, young specimens are too scarce in our woods to harvest. So I found myself limited to the abundant hardwoods.
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Fast—growing "trashwoods" such as wild cherry, the willows, butternut, alder, and poplar are technically hardwoods, but when young are too weak to support anything much heavier than a robin's nest. Similarly, small white, yellow, or black birches are not only weak structurally, but if limb scars and cut ends are exposed to the weather, posts will rot quickly but imperceptibly inside their thin, shiny, and waterproof bark.
I wanted to keep young sugar maples for future sap production, and preserve the scattering of oaks and the occasional beech or hickory sapling for posterity or firewood. This left me with scores of white ash saplings ranging from 2 to 6 inches through at the bole, including two stands that colonized clearings in the canopy left when a pair of large poplars blew down in a storm during the mid-eighties.
Logwood from mature, well-seasoned ash produces a genuinely hard hardwood that is traditionally used to make baseball bats or is fire-hardened for ax handles. My young ashes were arrow-straight, tough enough for a rustic structure, and grew so densely that they had to be shading one another out. I'd already begun harvesting the better trunks, stacking them to dry and debark naturally for use in building log-cabin rustic furniture tough enough to hold up to many generations of puppy teeth.
I picked out six trunks measuring between 4" and 5" in diameter at the base and 12' to 20' long to be trimmed to length to serve as the pergola's 4 vertical support posts and its pair of horizontal overhead rails. Trimmed—off top ends and smaller ash poles could serve as stretchers and dec orative infill between the main poles, and pole sections of 6" and larger trees could be split for roof shingles or half-rounds to close in the rear lean—to. Our woods is also full of ancient grape vines and seedling apple trees that could easily spare a few gnarly, curved sections of wood to form a gracefully curved settee back, naturally angled corner braces, and reinforcing knees.
Lacking your own trees of proper size, you can purchase 4" to 6" diameter cornerpost stock and smaller rails in needed lengths from a fencing contractor. Indeed, I considered purchasing our six main poles, as most fencing pros these days use plantation grown, naturally-long-lived red or white cedar that comes arrow-straight and with limbs trimmed even, with the thin, papery bark. But, at a dollar and up a running foot, fence poles would have cost much more than materials needed to weather—and rotproof the susceptible portions of wood that I can get for nothing...well nothing but the time and pleasant labor of cutting, trimming and dragging it out of the woods.
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