In the summer of 2009 the phone rang.

A voice I did not recognize said, "I've seen your work on your website and I like what you do with wood."

"I want you to know that the city is planning to cut down an elm tree that has a huge burl at the bottom, and I know that there is some beautiful wood there. I would hate to think that the tree would simply go to the dump to be burned. I thought I would call you to see if there was something you could do to get hold of that tree when they cut it down and make something beautiful out of it."

I jumped into the car and drove to Calrossie Street. This is what I found.

The burl was more than 4 feet in diameter and perfectly round. I found out later that a car had hit the tree in the early 1960s and the burl started to grow. What was unusual is that it completely encircled the tree. It was beautiful, and the neighborhood was delighted to have it there. It seems everyone in this older neighborhood had a photo with their children perched atop the burl, and sometimes cars of strangers would stop by, jump out and have their pictures taken on the burl. It was a landmark. Now, however, it had fallen victim to Dutch elm disease and was marked for destruction. I went around to a number of the houses, told people who I was and gave them my phone number. I asked them to call me when the city showed up to take the tree. I would try to make arrangements with the city to get the burl, but to be sure I would appreciate a call. It turned out to be the correct thing to do, because 6 months later I got a call from the neighbor. The work order for the crew was supposed to have instructions on it to let me know when the tree was coming down and to arrange for me to get the burl, but somehow the crew foreman had orders to deliver it to a friend of his. Well, after a phone call to the city forestry office the foreman was given the message to leave the burl for me.

I had a problem, though. My good friend, Jesse Antonation - a professional arborist - had agreed to help me with the burl and share it. He was to bring his big truck and trailer and we would haul the burl back to his work yard and cut it up. Jesse was in California on vacation when the call came, and I was faced with a dilemma - how was I going to haul the thing away? The owners of the home on the lot where the tree was planted kindly suggested that I could put the burl in their front yard and cut it up there to haul home in pieces. The lonely Husqvarna in the top panel shows the start of that process. About a foot of the top of the burl has already been cut off.

It was slow going. The wood, of course, was frozen solid and extremely dense and heavy. I was spending a lot of time sharpening the saw and answering a thousand questions from the neighbors that kept stopping by. It was a lot of fun, but as you can see in the second photo, it was as cold as it looks out there.

Fortunately, Jesse returned a few days later and helped me finish the job and clean up the yard. We had an ongoing sparring match about which was better - my Husqvarna or his Stihl - but it went pretty quickly once we went at with two saws.

This is Jesse, standing amidst the carnage. A lot of the burl had already been hauled away, as I had been there three days in a row planning the cuts and taking pieces home. So what you see here is not nearly all the wood from this giant burl.

A bit of a closer look at some of this beautiful and rare wood.

Now why did I trade my pickup truck for a PT Cruiser? Well, the Cruiser was cute and could actually seat four people quite comfortably, and, with the back seats taken out it could haul almost as much as the Ranger. Anyway, the little car certainly was down in the back end on the 2 mile trip home.

The biggest problem with a job like this is that there is cleanup involved, and since we had "borrowed" the yard we felt we had to leave it as clean as we could get it. There were many bags of shavings to haul away, and we left a small pile of smaller pieces for members of the club to come for if they wanted them.

The best part yet was turning the wet wood and roughing out pieces. It is a part of the process that I like more than anything else. Lovely wet wood shavings, no dust, quiet cutting and seeing the pieces take form from shapeless pieces of wood. It felt like I was paying a kind of respect to the tree and to all the people in that neighborhood that nurtured it and enjoyed it for so many decades.

Here you can begin to see what this wood is actually like inside the bark. I had never turned elm before, and I was completely captivated by the wood after just a few cuts. Beautiful color, smooth cutting and lovely grain patterns. I like working with burl wood, but this was different. It was more "figured" than burl. One thing I found out about elm. If there is a flaw in the wood treat it with respect, because it will fly apart at the slightest touch. I quickly learned that the slightest little crack needed to be tested with a screwdriver before turning on the lathe, and even then, stand out of the line of fire while roughing and stop the lathe often to check the wood. One thing about turning elm in Winnipeg. None - absolutely none - of the bark can be left on the wood, and every scrap of unused wood has to go to the dump for disposal. You cannot burn the scraps in your fireplace or store them. Dutch elm disease is a serious threat to the thousands of old elm trees we have in Winnipeg and there are strict guidelines about what you can do with the wood.