Removals to Harvest: Rethinking "Right Tree, Right Place"

Hang around arborists long enough, and you'll probably hear this phrase "right tree, right place." It often assumes that you're always planning to let a planted tree grow to maturity, and is used to urge people to not plant poplars under electrical lines, say, where they're bound to need to be trimmed at maturity.

Often this is an appropriate consideration, but increasingly I don't think this mode of thought is good universal guidance that will help guide us towards sustainable ecosystems. I think what will be more helpful for us is to bring principles of ecological succession into the residential space, as well as planning better for on-site and local use of residential wood products that will shorten supply chains and minimize fossil fuel usage. This isn't to say there's no role for mature trees, because of course there is--most of us have more than one big huge shade tree we encounter somewhere and love. This is more to say that sometimes, it makes sense to plant trees in residential spaces that you have no intention of letting reach maturity, or at least not in their "natural" form.

What does thinking about harvest and succession look like in practice?

Maybe it means knowing that you like using wooden supports to grow your tomatoes, so rather than buying stakes you plant a poplar coppice that you cut or have cut every few years to refresh your tomato stakes. Maybe it means seeing that you have an old tree that will probably need to be removed in the next ten years, so you plant a compatible species at its base to encourage a beneficial mycorrhizal relationship between the two, while reaching out to find a local woodworker who might be able to turn the wood from your mature tree into something you need, so when it's removal time you have a harvest plan and a succession plan. Maybe you have limited space, but your toddler loves mulberries, so you decide to create a mulberry pollard rather than letting the tree reach its full height.

Maybe it's not even clear what tree will thrive at a site in changing climatological conditions, so you plant two or three bare root saplings closer together than they "should" be planted, let them grow 4-5 years, and then harvest the ones that aren't thriving, turning them into poles for gardening, firewood, compost, or anything else you can think of.

How do you use wood in your life, and how can you meet those needs as close to home as possible? What's the role of "teenage" trees in your neighborhood of the ecosystem--do they all need to grow to maturity, or should they be harvested sooner?