The cedar is not common where we are, at the limit of its range. It is stunted in comparison to cedars we have seen elsewhere. Slow growers, some of these trees are centuries oldññpossibly older than any other north woods species.The cedar often grows as a set of trunks rising from a common base, in the midst of a stand of similar families of trunks. The trunks seldom emerge straight, but rise out of an initial, graceful curve. They weather to a beautiful gray color, with shaggy, loose strips of bark. The wood is light in color, aromatic, and wonderfully rot-resistant.
It is an old custom in the sauna (typically paneled in cedar), to bring in fresh cedar boughs, with which the participants gently lash themselves, purportedly to open the pores of the skin. Well and good, but my private suspicion is that these fragrant greens are brought in to counter odors that would otherwise prevail.
I have been grateful.
Another place where this special wood shows up is in the ribs of old-fashioned canoes. Light and strong, cedar made the frame, while birch bark, and later cedar strips or wood-canvas, made the skin. Such craft today tend to be hung on ceiling rafters to be admired for their beauty, but they proved more than beautiful through long centuries when they were the workhorses of the north.
The cedar is extremely vulnerable to fire. Its old-timers reach great age by growing in swamps, where fire cannot reach them. The foliage and the wood itself are resinous; if a flame catches the low-growing branches it can quickly climb through the cedar and ëcrowní in neighboring pines.
Beautiful in civilized settings, where it forms the familiar ëarbor vitaeí hedge, or the wind break at the sides of suburban homes, the cedar is a beloved resident of the wilderness as well.
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