Stands of hemlocks in varying states of death and decline are becoming ubiquitous in New York, where this tree has defined huge swathes of our ecosystem. The distinct shade and cool floor of hemlock forests are becoming eerily bright as branches fall and boughs are drained of life by the hemlock woolly adelgid.
Hemlocks had only just began to reestablish in parts of the Catskills and Hudson Valley where they were obliterated by the 19th century leather tanning industry. Barkpeelers spent the spring and summer felling, scoring, and peeling hemlocks to harvest their tannin-rich bark. The vast majority of trees were left to rot in the clearings; hemlock has never been considered good lumber.
The present collapse of hemlock has been a prolonged spiral. Adelgid populations initially stalled in the tree’s northern range because of freezing winters. As our yearly temperatures rise, it becomes more and more successful.
The laborers who did the footwork of denuding hemlock forests in the 19th century would have experienced the intense fuchsia color of hemlock’s inner bark as they split it. They would have smelled a rich, spiced, astringent scent as they pried the bark off with their bark spuds. And as hemlock disappeared, they saw the forest shift to hardwood saplings and underbrush.
In that story of extraction exists a relationship to trees that feels relevant, and strangely absent, today.
As we actively lose Eastern hemlock, our work is to see, acknowledge, and fall in love with its complex life and history in this landscape.
(Last two slides are from Peeling and Piling Bark for Prattsville Tannery, c. 1850)
@npsculpture @np_fpa #Easternhemlock #ecoart #sociallyengagedart #publicart #hemlockwoollyadelgid
a year agobarbara_dibeler
Thank you. Good story-telling here. Very moving and in some ways reminiscent of the buffalo experience. The story of Eastern hemlock wood use may be a bit more nuanced. I lived for some years in a section of a Hudson Valley stone house, built c. 1800, in which the timbers were made from locally harvested chestnut oak and hemlock. I could walk out the back door and into the adjacent woodland and see a stand of mature chestnut oak and hemlock. The soil in the area contained narrow fissures from which the limestone for the house presumably came from. According to the USFS, hemlock was commonly used in building during the colonial period and is now is considered useful in cross-laminated timber panels. https://www.fs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/usfs-eastern-hemlock-clt.pdf
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