Garry Oak (Quercus garryana or Oregon White Oak) is a wonderful tree, native to British Columbia, that can live for centuries. It lives near the Salish Sea, on dry rocky slopes or grassland meadows full of diverse species. You can identify it by its scaly furrowed bark, twisted branches, and generous drop of acorns. For thousands of years, indigenous people managed the garry oak savanna with controlled burns. Now there is less than 5% remaining of the range of garry oak, in a small area of southeastern Vancouver Island. Right here you can read about many aspects of these trees. The Garry Oak Meadow Preservation Society (GOMPS) and the Garry Oak Ecosystems Recovery Team (GOERTS) are good organizations working to protect garry oak trees.
Table of Contents
Click on the acorn to the left of the title to go directly to it.
Garry Oak and Artists - tree structure and creative transformation
Tree trio - Garry Oak, Douglas Fir, Arbutus
White Flowers in a Garry Oak Meadow - four flowers to identify
Garry Oak and Artists - tree structure and creative transformation
Peter Hackett
Dillon Lew'chuk
When a wonderful garry oak tree falls, or it is felled due to root rot, the wood of the tree may be transformed in creative ways by artists. I visited two artists in Victoria who have used garry oak in different and unique styles. Peter Hackett produces exceptional works through wood turning and sculpture. Dillon Lew’chuk has created a sensitive art piece of fine furniture.
When you see a bowl turned from garry oak, you can see its different colours – the heartwood, the non-living centre, is darker, and the sapwood outer layers are golden to white. Looking at a slice from a garry oak trunk, you can see the annular rings all round, and perpendicular to these rings are the medullary rays that appear to radiate from the centre. They conduct the sap and minerals from the centre to the periphery. When garry oak wood is quarter-sawn, the medullary rays look like twirling ribbons, or flecks of silver. In Arts and Crafts Movement furniture that was made of white oak, this was called the “flake figure”.
A garry oak tree that is cut in the forest is soaking wet inside, that is, 25% water. This presents great challenges for anyone who works with it. The wood must be dried and dehumidified or it will crack. Brought inside, it can explode suddenly, its internal structure fracturing and fragmenting. There are amazing methods for drying out garry oak wood, including boiling, freezing, or microwaving it. You’ll find out the experiences of artists Dillon Lew’chuk and Peter Hackett working with it.
Peter has used a lathe and a gouge to turn garry oak into bowls and vases and cups and – a teapot. He says, in turning, the lathe is like the horse, supplying all the power, the gouge is the plough making the cut and the turner is the ploughman gently steering it all. When you form a curved surface you have to control three different angles, all varying in different ways, all at the same time. If you had to think about it you couldn’t do it. Fortunately muscle memory takes over and it becomes an almost meditative experience.
Are all his household items merely functional? No, he says if you want to drink tea from a teapot, you can make it in ceramic. His vase reveals the inherent colours and variations and silver flecks in the wood. The design by nature in a bowl of his is more interesting than any fruit you can put in it.
In wood-turning, Peter can make his bowls only 1/8” thick. It takes garry oak one year to dehumidify one inch, so this is a reasonable wait before starting one. However, the finished bowl has to cure long enough so he knows it won’t crack. Sometimes he turns it once and waits with crossed fingers, then turns it again. Sometimes he packs it in a brown paper bag to absorb moisture, then in an outer plastic bag, and changes the damp paper bag every day. And yet, after it’s made, the shape of the bowl or vase often transforms from round to oval.
His vessels are smooth and pleasant to the touch. Peter sands them by hand with a felt pad and sandpaper of 4 to 6 different grits. He finishes them with walnut oil and beeswax.
Dillon Lew’chuk has used garry oak supplied by the Vancouver Island Woodturners Guild to make a chair that is an art object, not “fast furniture”. His chair is called “Time Moves, We Remain”. Looking at his chair, you can think about the flow of time and the idea that time is or is not running out. You may just think, “Wow, a giant working sand-filled timer, in the form of a chair!” You get to engage with it by turning the back 90 degrees, to spin it and watch the sand flowing from the top triangle down into the bottom triangle. You’re not invited to sit on it.
The chair parts are three thin layers of garry oak laminated together. The wood went through the natural process of air drying outside for three years. Unfortunately due to this natural process of slowly removing moisture, it dried unevenly, creating a wood defect called honeycombing. Honeycombing is an internal splitting of the wood due to the outer shell drying faster than the internal structure, and that causes the internal wood fibers to fracture. The result of this invisible wood defect was that the chair had to be made over three times by Dillon. The chair itself is joined together with glue and wood dominos, no nails or screws.
He finished it with iron acetate, made with steel wool in a jar of white vinegar. Garry oak is high in tannins, so this iron acetate interacted with the tannins, and with three coats, it turned a warm black. Behind the acrylic sheets, the white sand is actually a sandblasting medium, because sand would scratch the inside.
Dillon incorporated an important element in his design of the chair, inspired by his heritage of Ukrainian folklore. The Ukrainian symbol, Khvylyasti Liniyi, is wavy lines or spirals representing water and the fluid movement of time. He created a blue and white cross-stitch design on the seat, for water and time. And when the timer is flipped and the sand flows down, it is like clouds and water flowing down.
Knowing that Dillon Lew’chuk and Peter Hackett have employed this wood in such creative ways, you may have an even greater appreciation of garry oak trees.
For Peter’s artwork, go to: www.peterhackett.ca.
For Dillon’s artwork, go to: www.dillonlewchuk.com.
Tree Trio: Garry Oak, Douglas Fir, Arbutus
a young garry oak + an arbutus
Where Garry Oak (Quercus garryana) grows, on southeastern Vancouver island, we also find Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) and Arbutus (Arbutus menziesii). These are distinctive, drought-tolerant, native trees with fascinating connections. There are open meadows and mixed woodlands with Garry Oak and Douglas Fir. Eventually, in the successional trajectory, Douglas Fir will predominate. But fire is a friend to the fire-resistant Garry Oak, taking out the Douglas Fir trees that block its sunlight, and allowing Garry Oak the space to thrive. Fire doesn’t phase an Arbutus trunk – it can drop some branches and sprout fresh growth from the base.
Consider the bark of these three trees. Mature Garry Oak bark is tough reptilian scales. Douglas Fir bark is thick groovy ridges. Arbutus, or Madrona, is the darling of BC painters: deep burnt sienna bark peels away to expose the chartreuse green inner bark, and dark red curls are shed on the ground.
old garry oak, douglas fir, arbutus
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The Scottish botanist David Douglas named the Garry Oak for his assistant Garry, and of course Douglas Fir was named for him, although its Latin name, Pseudotsuga menziesii, is in honour of the rival Scottish botanist Alexander Menzies. His name went to Arbutus menziesii, too. Arbutus comes from rbutus, meaning strawberry, because its red berries look like strawberries, much enjoyed by birds.
When our native Garry Oaks leaf out, we can quickly tell a Garry Oak from the introduced English Oak. On a Garry Oak, the petiole, or short stem to the leaf is 1-2 cm. long, but almost invisible on an English Oak. Both Garry Oak and English Oak are White Oaks. The leaf shape of White Oaks is Wide; the leaf shape of Red Oaks is Rough (pointed). (see below)
The needles on a Douglas Fir are flat with a groove in the centre. These evergreen conifers through the winter are lovely. Arbutus is the only broadleaf evergreen tree in BC, and it is termed both evergreen and deciduous, because it carries both its new leathery green leaves and its old browned leaves at the same time, looking weird until summer when the old leaves fall.
Trees have an underground network of mycorrhizal fungus: trees supply sugar to the fungus and fungus gives soil nutrients to the trees. Dr. Suzanne Simard at UBC began The Mother Tree Project in 2015 and discovered the chemical signals Douglas Fir trees send to each other - the same kind of signals as human neurotransmitters! Mother trees feed their seedlings. They have kin recognition, sending more nutrients to help Douglas Fir trees than to other types of trees. The offspring grow much better if they are in the network. I’m hoping that researchers will investigate this interconnection between Garry Oak trees as well. When repotting a young Garry Oak seedling, we are advised to include some soil from underneath a full-grown Garry Oak – some of that familiar fungus, no doubt, to help it do well in its new home. We should maintain as many Garry Oaks as we can in our unique environment.
The life span of a Garry Oak and of a Douglas Fir can be so much longer than ours, 500 years or more, and an Arbutus may be 300 years old. In our time on earth, let’s appreciate and protect this trio of trees.
Garry Oak leaf
English Oak leaves
Red Oak leaf in autumn
White Flowers in a Garry Oak Meadow
Garry oak meadows have flowers from early spring to fall. Walking through the garry oaks, you can look out for four white flowers – white fawn lily, yarrow, ocean spray, and pearly everlasting.
White fawn lilies (Erythronium oregonum) appear in March or April. They face the ground and their recurved tips point up. I used to see masses of them up on a cliff, looking down at me, and always thought of them as wild Easter lilies. What look like white petals are actually tepals. Fawn lilies’ lance-shaped leaves may be dappled with brown and white, like a fawn, but they are deer-resistant.
Yarrow flowers (Achillea millefolium) are a cluster of ivory-coloured pompoms. Like daisies, they are disk flowers surrounded by ray flowers, but both white. Yarrow leaves are soft and ferny. Dried yarrow leaves were traditionally used as an anti-inflammatory, to heal wounds. The stalks are sturdy. If you have ever consulted the I Ching for a meditative fortune-telling, you will know that 50 yarrow stalks were the traditional sticks thrown to generate a 6-line hexagram.
yarrow
ocean spray
pearly everlasting
Creamy white ocean spray flowers (Holodiscus discolor) are a pollinator plant for bees and butterflies, and a host for the caterpillars of tiger swallowtail butterflies. Ocean spray flowers in June to July, in a long hanging cluster of little stars, on a bush that may be 3 to 4 metres high. The wood is so strong that First Nations people have used it to make arrows and fish hooks and knitting needles. It’s a wonder to me that a company stole the name and now consumer culture associates ocean spray with cranberries.
Pearly everlasting (Anaphalis margaretacea) look like dried flower bouquets even before they’re dried. The tiny white scaly bracts are papery. The narrow leaves and stalks are a dry grey-green, glossy on top, wooly underneath. Pearly everlasting are the last to flower. They look interesting even into late fall, and birds will eat their seeds in winter. This sexy flower is one of those with males and females on separate plants, and wind does the pollination. Looking closely at them, you can see that the female flowers are fluffy and their yellow centres are circled in brown. The male flowers have brown stamens poking out. When the female flowers are ultimately fluffy and their centres turn dark brown, the seeds are there. More pearly everlasting flowers will spread.
I hope you will appreciate all four of these white flowers the next time you are enjoying the beauty of a garry oak meadow.
