When I first read about how Pacific Coastal Tribes made use of the Western Redcedar’s bark for clothing, it immediately conjured up the image of them walking around in an armoured suit made out of wood. Using wood for clothing seemed incredibly uncomfortable -think of the splinters!- but at the time I just let the irrationality of it go. Hey, it was hundreds of years ago right?

There is a wizened Catalpa in Vancouver’s Jericho Beach covered in “DO NOT CLIMB” signs. The tree was likely planted during the Catalpa Craze that swept North America in response to widespread fears of a “timber famine”.

About a few weeks ago I removed a small sapling of a European Sycamore Maple (Acer pseudoplatanus) from a forest near me in Jericho Beach, Vancouver. It’s considered an invasive, shade-tolerant tree in the park.

There’s one tree commonly planted in Vancouver’s smaller parks that still reminds me of home…. despite not actually being from my home. It’s the original Christmas Tree. The European Red Pine. Commonly known in Canada as the Scots Pine, Pinus sylvestris.

Elm Trees make up a large part of the incredible Winnipeg and Guelph Urban Forests and they are dying.

Pine (Pinus spp.) trees fascinate me. Somewhere along their hundreds of million-year evolutionary history they decided to radically change their growth strategy away from their fellow coniferous, needle-leaf, trees.

When I was living in Guelph, Ontario I used to spend a lot of time in a forest just outside city limits hiking to a massive oak tree that the locals call “Titan”. Titan was maybe the biggest tree I’ve even seen. It looked like a tree that Druids would worship. It was an Eastern North American Bur Oak, Quercus macrocarpa, America’s strongest Oak.