The Growers of Woods

1/14 Forester Taisa Brown shows why some areas in the Sayward Valley have been replanted many times: elk browsing. White cones on the hillside are meant to protect young trees from deer, but elk often knock them over and strip the green from young trees. All photos copyright Hans Peter Meyer.

2/14 On a sunny spring day, forester Taisa Brown works with Victoria Peak in the background.

3/14 Bag up. Trees are kept in heat-reflective canopies or under white tarps to keep them cool. Planters fill their bags up to 20 per cent of their body weight, take a quick break, and get back to putting trees in the ground. Most tree planting is piece work.

4/14 Planter Sherman Tork scales difficult access.

5/14 It's steep. The slash is deep. The slash is big. Typical hard ground to plant after a heli-logging operation.

6/14 With 20 plus years in the industry, Sherman Tork gets "technical" in the heli-logged slash piles.

7/14 Forester Taisa Brown surveys a particularly nasty slash pile for planted trees.

8/14 On a rare patch of "open" ground on this hillside a Douglas Fir seedling has been planted, and flagging tape left to mark the spot so that planters following the "trail" don't have to spend extra time looking.  

9/14 The work is hard, but the views in the coastal mountaints, spectacular. Jeremy Wedel enjoys the view from a heli-logged slashpile.

10/14 Sherman Tork finds a plantable spot on a rock bluff. His 20 years plus experience makes the difference.

11/14 Pete Bastaraba coming into the landing with empty bags, his tree planting compatriot heading out with full bags.

12/14 Pete Bastaraba has counted out his trees (typically 15-25 per bundle, depending on size and age of stock) and is about to "bag up."

13/14 Planters do strange things, like drinking green beverages between bag-ups. Pete Bastaraba catches some liquids before heading back into the slash.

14/14 And back at 'er! It's steep, with big slash. Classic old growth coastal ground. Slow going, "technical" planting.

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[Editor's note: Click the arrows above to see a photo essay and learn about some of the joys and hardships of life as a tree planter in the Sayward Valley on Vancouver Island. All photos taken April 2013 and copyright Hans Peter Meyer.]

Anyone who's spent more than a few weeks in caulk boots has run into it: the romance of the woods. It's particularly fierce in the early spring, after a long winter of no money and physical inactivity.

Whether you're a logger, forester, or tree planter, there's something exciting about "getting back at 'er." Even my daughter, who'd happily thrown her planting bags into my shed after a challenging rookie year, admitted to looking forward to it. For long-timers, it's the awakening of a slumbering love/hate romance. We keep coming back for something, and it's not just the money.

For those in the planting world, Charlotte Gill's award-winning novel Eating Dirt is perhaps the best account of the job. Still, Eating Dirt doesn't quite get underneath what one fellow-traveller called the "terminal uniqueness" of the culture and economy of this industry.

Gill's account is powerful and evocative, but photographs can perhaps add to what she writes, telling in a different way the story of what planters deal with. This small collection of images describes a few hours with the Lukwa contracting crew. When these photos were taken, the crew was working a particularly gnarly bit of broken coastal ground, typical of a helicopter-logged setting. The backdrop: a beautiful valley near Sayward crowned by majestic Victoria Peak.

How are conditions this season? I asked Evan Gough, a more than 20-year veteran of the industry who's been supervising tree planting camps for the past few years.

"It's been a good spring," he says. "With the uptick on the logging side, there's more volume for us to plant. Supply and demand. We're coming out of a slow period and the prices are better than they've been. Most people have done better financially this spring than in recent years."

Which is a good thing. Because at the end of a hard day in the slash, it's the price per tree that puts food on the table.

I hope that someday Gill contradicts an earlier refusal to write a fictional novel based on her extensive experience of the culture, landscape, and economy of the tree planting industry. There's something "beyond the facts" -- beyond photographs, beyond the account she's already given -- about the industry that begs for what only a novel can do.

Perhaps that novel will be a bit of release for those of us who've been moved, and confounded, by our sometimes painful love affair with the woods.