Splitting a fresh birch log into spoon blanks in a shared yard

Cut 01 of 04

Where green wood comes from when you live in a flat

Living on the third floor of a five-storey block means I have no woodpile and nowhere to keep one. What I have instead is a district full of birch, a few old cherry trees behind the garages, and a steady trickle of pruning through the autumn and late winter. Once the neighbours worked out that the person on the balcony was making spoons, branches started appearing by the entrance with a note, or someone would knock and say that a tree was coming down at their mother's house on the other side of town and did I want any of it. I always say yes and then choose carefully from what arrives.

The ideal piece for me is a straight section of trunk or a large branch, somewhere between ten and eighteen centimetres across and at least forty long, with no knots in the middle third. Anything thinner than about eight centimetres gives blanks that are too narrow for a cooking spoon once the pith is split out. Anything much thicker than twenty is hard to split with the tools I have and heavy to carry up three flights of stairs. I have learned to leave the rest, however beautiful the bark, because a log I cannot use sits in the stairwell for a week and annoys everyone who walks past it.

Timing matters more than I expected. Wood cut in the dormant months, from November to early March, is full of water but not of sap, and it dries more evenly. Birch cut in April is a different material entirely: this is the season when people here tap the trees for sap to drink, and a birch log from that month weeps for days and grows mould on the cut ends almost overnight. I carve it if it comes, but I carve it fast and I never keep it.

Cut 02 of 04

Birch, alder and cherry, and what each one is like to carve

Birch is the wood I carve most because it is the wood I am offered most. Fresh birch is pale, even and forgiving, it takes a clean facet straight off the knife, and it rarely splits where I do not want it to. Its weakness is that it has very little figure, so a birch spoon is only as interesting as its shape, and it can spalt and stain grey if it sits wet for too long. I think of it as the wood for learning, and for everyday spoons that are meant to be used hard and replaced.

Alder surprises everyone the first time. The inside of a freshly split alder log is pale cream, and within ten minutes of the air reaching it the whole face turns a bright orange, like the inside of a carrot, before fading over the following weeks to a warm tan. It carves more softly than birch and cuts beautifully across the grain, which makes it a pleasure for bowls, but it is weaker, so I leave alder handles a little thicker. Cherry is the prize. It is harder, it holds fine detail, and the heartwood darkens to a reddish brown after oiling, but it cracks more readily while drying and I lose perhaps one cherry blank in three to checks from the end grain.

Cut 03 of 04

Reading the log and splitting it through the pith

Before any tool touches the log I look at both ends. The pith, the small soft centre where the tree started growing each year, needs to come out of every spoon, because it shrinks differently from the wood around it and is where most of the cracks in my first spoons began. I also look for the direction the growth rings run and for any existing checks radiating from the centre. If there is already a crack, I split along it rather than across it, because the log has chosen that line for me and fighting it wastes wood.

Splitting happens at the chopping block in the yard, a short round of old poplar that the caretaker lets me keep behind the bins. I stand the log on end, set the axe edge across the pith, and drive it in with a wooden club made from an offcut of birch branch. I never strike the back of the axe with a metal hammer; it damages the eye of the axe and sends chips flying. Once the split has opened a few centimetres I work down the side with a wedge of hard wood, and the log comes apart into two halves with the pith sitting on each face.

A half-log makes one large cooking spoon, or I split it again into quarters for eating spoons. The final step is to take the pith off each piece with the axe, removing a strip about a centimetre wide down the middle of the flat face. The flat face then becomes the top of the spoon, and the bark side becomes the back. Laid out that way, the growth rings run in shallow arcs across the bowl, which is the orientation that dries with the least distortion.

Cut 04 of 04

Keeping billets green until I can get to them

The real difficulty for a carver in a flat is not getting wood but keeping it wet. A split billet left on a sunny balcony in May starts checking from its ends within a day. For the first year I lost about half of what I split this way, and it was painful to throw good cherry into the stove because I had not found time to carve it before it cracked. What works now is a combination of small splits, sealed ends and cold storage.

I split only what I can carve in the next week and leave the rest as whole logs in the coolest corner of the stairwell cellar, with the ends painted with a thick layer of old wax from candle stubs melted in a tin. Split blanks go into a plastic bag with a handful of wet shavings and sit in the shade under the bench. In the depths of winter the balcony itself is a freezer, and a bagged blank stays green there for months; I bring it inside the night before I want to carve so it thaws slowly.