Giving New Life to Austin’s Fallen Trees
While installing a library bookcase in a client’s home one day, woodworker Kris Burns heard the buzzing of a chainsaw. He looked outside the window and witnessed a tree being cut down. Without a truck to collect and haul the logs, Burns watched as the tree was chopped into tiny pieces, ready to be grinded up into mulch.
Burns and his business partner, Andrew Danziger had a revelation: Why not start a business that utilizes all this urban lumber so we can use this resource to its highest potential?
Armed with a portable saw, the two furniture makers founded Harvest Lumber Co., a sustainable sawmill that saves fallen trees from the fate of the wood chipper and repurposes them into usable slabs of lumber.
“I was staring out the window and I saw this big ash tree coming down,” Burns said. There’s not a lot of giant ash trees [in Austin] - and there was nothing I could do about it,” Burns said.
The sawmill collects up to ten logs a month of various diameters and species, including pecan, American elm and uncommon trees like pear or walnut. Milled and cut into dimensional lumber, the slabs sit out to air dry for three to six weeks.
Once dried, Harvest Lumber Co. sets them out in their showroom where customers can purchase wood for their personal projects.
“Lots of small projects are great to see,” Burns said. “Anywhere from somebody making a coffee table, to us making huge conference tables. [Customers] buy a slab then do the work themselves.”
A third of the trees the urban sawmill receives are from development purposes, like building a pool in a family backyard. Around 530 trees are cut down each year in Austin, according to Joshua Erickson, program manager for the City of Austin Parks Department. Although Harvest Lumber Co.’s business relies on fallen trees, Burns’ feels conflicted with the fact that the natural resource is being cleared out for building new apartments and homes. He wishes developers would utilize the trees in their construction plans rather than slicing a chainsaw through them.
“They’re providing shade for the houses — a habitat for animals and birds,” Burns said. “Having a nice old pecan tree or oak tree is also going to increase the [property] value of a lot.”
The other portion of their logs are sourced from the Wood Reclamation program run by the City of Austin’s Urban Forestry Department. Similar to the mill’s mission, the program began as an initiative to reduce the amount of sturdy wood piling up in landfills to be chipped up into mulch. Once a month, the department hosts a pick-up day where people can collect a log at no cost.
The urban forestry program manages tree risk of the parkland, so most of the trees that are removed for Wood Reclamation are diseased and cannot be saved, or have a structural defect that poses a risk to the public.
Burns recalls a big walnut tree that was cut down from the great lawn area of Zilker Park and used for the program. Harvest Lumber Co. hauled the tree onto a truck, milled it down and sold the historic slabs to their customers.
“Everybody was excited. Those who bought one were able to say, ‘this slab came from Zilker Park, a landmark in Austin.’” Burns said.
Harvest Lumber Company also donates wood for public projects.
For example, they sourced cypress wood from the 2016 Blanco floods to create some of the benches that sit at the boardwalk at Lady Bird Lake.
Their latest contribution is in partnership with the Pease Park Conservancy to donate wood for a giant troll sculpture that is set to be unveiled on March 15.
Danish artist Thomas Dambo will utilize recycled old growth douglas fir from a decommissioned water tower at the University of Texas’s J.J. Pickle Research Campus.
Reclaimed by Harvest Lumber Co., the planks will be used to construct the hands and feet of the troll with the head already assembled and shipped from Denmark. The 60-year-old wood is weather resistant, which will ensure the “Pease Park Troll” lives north of the park for at least 15 years.
Burns says his ideal goal is to utilize every felled urban tree for art projects like Dambo’s, or for new products like cross laminated timber, an eco-friendly building material. He’d like to build a bigger network of local sustainable businesses to expand their eco-friendly mission.
“We’re a small business, so we can only do so much. If given the opportunity to scale up, we could reach out to more tree companies and we could have a bigger impact,” he said. “And you know, you can’t get more sustainable than [sourcing] from a local business in Austin.”
Photography by Jenna Wilson