When I was five years old in 1972 my kindergarten teacher gave me my first homework assignment. I had to go home and find a seed in my yard and bring it back to school. After school, when I got to my home on Maple Terrace in Park Ridge, N.J. I started looking around the yard, and after a few minutes of searching I got frustrated because I hadn’t found any seeds. I don’t think I knew what a seed looked like. Then a gust of wind came which shook the large maple tree in our front yard situated five or ten feet in front of the main entrance to the house. It was a huge maple that split into two equal sized trunks about three feet above the ground. The zephyr was strong enough to detach two or three helicopter seeds from some high branches. I had never really noticed them, but because they were now part of my first homework assignment I carefully watched them descend to the ground. I picked one of them up and brought it to school the next day. Back then each kindergartener got their own half pint of milk in a cardboard container every day. We took that day’s milk container, put our name on it, cut off the tops, filled them with dirt and planted the seed that we had brought in. We left them in the classroom for a week or two taking a few moments each day to water the seeds. Not all of the seeds sprouted, but I was one of the lucky ones. My seed grew into a tiny light-green plant. When we were allowed to take it home I waited for my father to come home from work and he helped me select a place in the yard where we dug a little hole and planted the sprout. It took to the spot and we watched it quickly grow into a small tree.

Forty three years later my mother is still living in the same house. The tree grew to be four or five stories high and my mother was concerned that a storm would bring it down on her house or on the neighbor’s house. It was well within reach of both houses. The decision was made to cut it down. One of my hobbies is woodworking so with the help of my brother, I’ve kept the wood from the tree with the intention of building things with it. For my first project I made a bunch of spatulas. The tree was a sugar maple and it is somewhat unique in that there is a large degree of ambrosia spalting present in its wood.

Spalting is any form of wood coloration caused by a fungus. If the spalting is caused by the ambrosia fungus which is carried into the tree by an ambrosia beetle which lives symbiotically with ambrosia fungus, then this spalting is called ambrosia. The small ambrosia beetle bores a network of tunnels and short galleries called cradles. The fungus it introduces into the wood is responsible for the blue, gray and brown streaks and decorative patch work that accompany each tunnel and adjacent wood. The fungus is eaten by the beetle and then gets into the tree sap when the beetle eats into the tree, and it spreads both through the worm-hole and up and down in the tree (carried along by the sap) and causes discoloring of the wood in streaks. It is these streaks which are so desirable to woodworkers as it produces patterns in the wood that are pleasing to the eye. The streaks and patch work add a unique look to this hardwood without affecting its structural integrity. Ambrosia wood is mostly found in the central part of Eastern United States. Ambrosia beetles typically infest maples but are also known to infest other species such as birch, aspen and beech.

I’m still in touch with the son of my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Conway (her son works with my brother). I sent Mrs. Conway one of the spalted spatulas I made with the wood from my sugar maple along with the narrative above and the following note:

“Your teaching directly resulted in bringing me closer to one of the processes in nature that have the ability to inspire wonder, and it created a very early memory that I have kept to this day. It has also given me a heck of a lot of beautiful wood made by me to build furniture and other household implements. I have grown to be an avid environmentalist and I do a lot of hiking and camping in the Adirondacks, the Green Mountains of Vermont and the White Mountains of New Hampshire and I suspect that this love of the forest and nature was not a little influenced by your good teaching. Teachers are so important in our communities and in my opinion greatly underappreciated (and under-paid) so I wanted to give you one of the spatulas I made from the sugar maple wood as a token of my thanks.”