[APWG] planting invasives on federal land

[ForestRuss at aol.com]

new pitch for royal paulonia
 
 
'Tree of the future'
Myrtle Creek resident promotes special Empress  hardwood trees that can
mature in eight years
ADAM PEARSON,  apearson at newsreview.info
November 30, 2005

MYRTLE CREEK - John Garbini  imagines a land, specifically Western Oregon,
where hardwood trees mature in  eight years and self-sufficiently regrow from
their stumps after  harvest.

In fact, he can almost see it now. Except the 2-month-old trees  on the back
of his property are still the size of freshly planted  seedlings.

"This is what we call a real sustainable forest in our  lifetime," Garbini
says, surveying the 500 Empress trees planted on 1.5 acres  of his land atop
a ridge overlooking Interstate 5.

The Empress tree,  Garbini claims, is the tree of the future - a tree that
can produce lumber at  an alarmingly fast rate, grow practically anywhere,
and consume a ton of  carbon dioxide in its lifetime. Calling it "the lungs
of the earth," he says  it "upstages every other tree."

He hopes it will eventually replace  Douglas fir in the Northwest and pine
trees in the South and East Coast as  building material for the future.

By regrowing itself every eight years,  as many as seven times in its
lifetime, Garbini says the Empress "can fill in  the gap of harvesting the
fir trees."

But Garbini knows the Empress  has a long way to go before it becomes the
staple tree of the timber  industry.

In order to advance it, Garbini wants to promote the Empress to  private
property owners. He says farmers and ranchers can easily benefit from  its
supplemental source of income by setting aside one acre of property for  a
tree plantation.

In a few years, Garbini hopes to make an example by  pointing toward his
plantation as proof.

Garbini claims the Empress  typically matures at about 18 inches in diameter
after eight years of growth.  He says its current market value is $3 a board
foot. With each tree on his  property expected to produce about 100 board
feet, Garbini believes his  investment will grow into a $150,000 payoff on
his 800-acre  ranch.

Though the trees' origins are rooted in China, Garbini acquired  his order of
trees from a nursery in Scottsdale, Ariz. That's where  four-year-old company
World Tree Technologies has altered the genetic makeup  of the Chinese
Paulownia tree and ships its hybrid seedlings - or cloned  "startlings" - as
Empress trees to interested buyers. The trees are  duplicated by cloning from
a mother stock of tissue culture to produce a  uniformity of trees that share
the same characteristics.

"The goal is  to move to a timber-based plantation to stop the destruction of
old-growth  harvests," Wendy Burton, owner of World Tree Technologies, said
of the  Empress.

But local foresters are wary to embrace a non-native tree in  Western
Oregon's forests. They remember a hybrid tree from the 1980s, known  as KMX,
that was pushed as revolutionary but ultimately lost its value within  the
timber industry once it reached maturity.

A cross between  knob-cone pine and Monterey pine, KMX was not cold hardy
enough and resulted  in rough quality.

Not that the KMX experience would prevent  experimentation with different
trees.

Empress trees  glance
According to World Tree Technologies, the Empress tree is a hybrid of  the
Paulownia tree and is cloned for its light and durable wood.
The  Empress can grow up to 20 feet tall its first year and up to five and 10
feet  a year each successive year.
The Empress can be harvested every seven to 10  years - two to four times
faster than any other comparable tree, and it can  regenerate from its root
structure as many as seven times.
The Empress can  yield up to 30,000 board feet per acre every seven to 10
years.
The  Empress has four times the foliage area of the average tree and can
consume  as much as four times the carbon dioxide. At the same time, it is
said it can  produce as much as four times the oxygen of the average tree.

"I think  it's good for folks to try these things. But I think there needs to
be more  research before we operate it on a large scale," Dan Newton,
forester with  Roseburg Forest Products, said of experimenting with the
Empress  tree.

Newton said the native species, Douglas fir, is adaptable and  extremely
marketable for his company's current production.

Burton said  Empress lumber is already a popular item in Australia among
sailboat builders  for its lightness and strength. She said it's also
catching on in the United  States among cabinet builders and furniture
makers.

She said there is  a strong demand for the trees' lumber, and her company has
a database which  is backlogged with potential buyers for when the trees
reach maturity. She  said that besides the plantations her company planted
four years ago and the  trees it has sold, she knows of one other plantation
of Empress trees in the  United States, which is located in Georgia.

"We get calls all the time  for, 'We need more Empress wood,'" Burton said.

Burton said the Empress  is 30 percent stronger than pine and 40 percent
lighter than all other  hardwoods. And its large leaves consume more carbon
dioxide than almost any  other deciduous tree as well.

"This wood is phenomenal," she  said.

Burton said 300 trees for an acre of property sell for $5,000. As  long as a
buyer clears his land for a plantation of that size, World Tree  Technologies
provides the planting, fertilization and irrigation of Empress  trees, she
said.

She added that tree owners must be prepared to  maintain tree growth and
durability by knocking off limbs from trunks as they  grow.

As far as introducing the Empress to Umpqua National Forest matrix  lands,
where harvesting traditionally takes place, Umpqua Supervisor Jim  Caplan
said it is not a possibility.

"As far as the Forest Service is  concerned, we plant only native species,"
Caplan said.

But that  doesn't take away from Garbini's original goal: Introducing the
Empress to  private property owners as a source of income and as a friend to
the  environment.

"If we can capture CO2 and make a profit too, what the heck  is wrong with
that?" Garbini asked.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.plantconservation.org/pipermail/apwg_lists.plantconservation.org/attachments/20051202/25da237c/attachment.html>