Slabs of wood fill up shelves and are leaned against every wall and propped up on sawhorses. She stands at a 9-foot wedge of Indian Rosewood, often used to make guitars and considered the Cadillac of locally grown wood.
Zoe Bocik, left, co-owner of Funktionhouse Urban Lumber and Furnishings in St. Petersburg, cuts a table top from Australian pine in her workshop. A coffee table, top, made of Southern magnolia holds a vase made of camphor and a candy dish made of lace wood from a silk oak tree. Above, a coffee/cocktail table of Norfolk Island pine. Photos by SCOTT KEELER | Times
"We look at these trees like treasure chests," Bocik said as she ran her hand along the wood.
And for good reason. An Indian Rosewood tree can be worth thousands of dollars. They grow well in Florida, but when removed from a local yard or park, the trunks are most often mulched or buried in a landfill — often at a cost of hundreds of dollars for homeowners or tree removal businesses.
Meanwhile, furniture makers pay as much as $30 per foot to import of the same wood that is being thrown away.
Across the country, small-scale woodworkers like Bocik and her husband, Robert, have carved out hardscrabble second careers finding a second life for these trees.
"We can use these trees to make something beautiful," Zoe said.
Alan Mayberry has seen a lot of excellent wood go to waste in his 30 years as an arborist in Clearwater.
"I just think about the thousands of houses that could have been built out of those logs," he said. "We're running out of room in the landfills and logs take up a lot of room."
Today, if a 60-year-old neighborhood tree gets damaged in a storm or is dying, the property owner often hires a tree service to remove it. The companies mulch the small pieces and branches themselves. The large trunks don't fit in the wood chipper and the majority of the time those are taken to a landfill, where the company pays $37 per ton for them to be buried or burned for energy. A good-sized tree trunk can weigh eight or nine tons.
Mayberry estimates that less than 5 percent of the trees that these companies cut down are large and valuable enough to be turned into lumber, furniture or art. But it still adds up.
The wood that local woodworkers crave also includes camphor, eucalyptus, old citrus, black cherry, hickory, cedar and bald cypress (though the live oak that dominates the area isn't usable for woodworking).
Tree services know this, but it's not always worth their while to deliver the downed trees to a wood worker, and the mills that used to turn local tree trunks into usable material shuttered years ago. Yes, it can save the tree services dumping fees, but the woodworkers generally don't want to pay for the trees, and coordinating drop off times can make it too much of a time and money suck.
"It's a very competitive business and debris disposal is a big part of that business," Mayberry said. "They have to be efficient and it's not as feasible as you might think."
In fact, some woodworkers just head to the dump and sift through piles of debris to find materials.
Sam Sherrill, an economist and woodworker who lives in Arizona, said that urban lumber businesses have spread across the county, but the operations are small and can't keep up with the volume of wasted material.
"These little businesses are popping up all over the country but they're not connected to one another and that's what is missing," he said.
He hopes to form a national organization of woodworkers, tree removal services and local governments to prevent the hardwood trees from ever hitting a landfill or being turned into mulch.
"There is potential," Mayberry agreed. "It takes coordination and a willingness to see the more societal purpose."
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