Cedar

Reading about the totem poles of the Pacific northwest coast, roughly Vancouver BC north to Glacier Bay AK, and the people that put them up, I thought I needed to know a bit more about the trees used to make them, the Western red cedar, otherwise Thuja plicata. And reference 1 turned up.

My copy, a large format paperback, from the University of Washington Press, in good condition, was bought very reasonably from eBay from the World of Books at Goring-by-Sea in West Sussex. It had come to them from the US, via Abebooks and someone at Tonbridge School, probably a member of the staff there. Getting on for 200 pages, with lots of illustrations, mostly drawings by the author.

A book about both the red cedar and the yellow cedar, two large trees important to the aboriginals of this coast. The coastal (rain) forests were full of them, and there still seem to be enough left for the timber to be important commercially, even over here in the UK, although I have not inquired about whether we grow our own. See, for example, reference 5.

Economic and social rather than biological and botanical – although to judge by the number of copies of the snap above that Google Images turns up on social media, there is plenty of stuff out there about that too.

The book includes a lot of drawings, drawn by the author. A testament, inter alia, to the value of a careful drawing, informative in a quite different way from a photographic image of the same thing. Also, these days, a lot more expensive: a drawing is not made by tapping a telephone.

The sample above was lifted from the Internet Archive. Maybe one day, the computer will be able to convert a photographic image into such a drawing, without a person needing to bother to study the thing in question at all.

I learn from reference 1, that the whole tree was used. The wood, the timber, was used for the totem poles with which I started, for canoes and for housing. Smaller pieces were used for various carved objects, in particular bentwood boxes and ritual masks. This was men’s work. While the bark, the withies (see trivia below) and the roots were put to all kinds of mainly domestic uses: baskets, clothing, matting, twine and rope. This was women’s work.

People who, until the nineteenth century, did not have access to iron, did not seem to make pottery and did not have significant access to wool for weaving. European iron and European woollens – blankets – became important trade items. And the arrival of iron made it much easier to work the trees and their timber.

The use of more or less whole logs to make (dug out) canoes and beams, struck me as terribly wasteful, only sustainable because the 19th century population was very small – and without chain saws. While the use of all the bits and pieces by the women seemed much more economical, ecological even.

Some of the relevant features of red cedar wood were that it came in large, straight and clean logs; it split cleanly; it was light; strong, while still being soft enough to carve easily and flexible enough to bend into boxes; and, long-lasting. Ideal for totem poles.

The wood carver, the wood worker, was a high-status occupation. In part because the carver of a totem pole or a mask needed to be privy to all kinds of family history, perhaps not the sort of thing you would want to explain to all-comers.

A book organised into seven parts, a properly magical number, with most of the parts being dedicated to a class of usage.

Trivia

The yellow cedar is one of the two ancestors of our own Leylandii hedging, along with the Monterey cypress (Cupressus macrocarpa), from much further south. A chance cross, originally from Wales.

The giant redwoods, also in the cypress family (aka Cupressaceae), might come from the same general area, but are quite different. And also somewhat bigger. See previous notice of Wellingtonias.

The word ‘withy’, according to OED, was an old word for willow. Then for the long shoots of the weeping willow, used for baskets and such. Maybe the weeping habit means that the shoots do not need the rigidity which would otherwise make them inflexible. Then for long, flexible shoots more generally, including those of these cedars. Those snapped above are from a weeping willow by the stream in Longmead Road, here in Epsom.

Captain Cook was one of the first Europeans to arrive on the coast, in the late eighteenth century, along with Russians and Spaniards, amongst others. His travelling artist made the sketch above, lifted from reference 6.

Conclusions

I dare say that I got on with this book because a lot of it was about wood and working with wood – something that I am familiar with – I know about the feel of wood under a tool.

In any event, I found it an excellent supplement to my reading about the red cedar totem poles of the Pacific northwest coast.

References

Reference 1: Cedar: Tree of Life to the Northwest Coast Indians – Stewart, Hilary – 1984, 2009.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuja_plicata. The western red cedar. ‘… Thuja plicata is a large to very large tree, ranging up to 45 to 70 metres (150 to 230 feet) tall and 2.4 to 7 m (8 to 23 ft) in trunk diameter…’.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callitropsis_nootkatensis. The yellow cedar. ‘… Callitropsis nootkatensis is an evergreen conifer growing up to 40 meters (131 ft) tall, exceptionally 60 m (200 ft), with diameters up to 3.4 to 4 m (11 to 13 ft)…’.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Stewart. A Canadian, 1924-2014. Studied at St. Martin's School of Art. 

Reference 5: https://duffieldtimber.com/the-workbench/buyers-guides/western-red-cedar-alaskan-yellow-cedar-differences. 

Reference 6: Colonial Identities: Canada from 1760 to 1815 – Bruce G. Wilson, National Archives of Canada – 1988.

Reference 7: Guide to flowering plant families - Wendy B. Zomlefer - 1994. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill. Another good book with lots of drawings.

Reference 8: The tree of life: a phylogenetic classification – Lecointre and Le Guyader – 2006. And another.

Reference 9: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/05/old-and-new.html. Previous notice of the totem poles.