Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens recently expanded one of the upper parking lots. In the process, a few large white pines needed to be cut down to make more space for guests and their vehicles. The gardens’ horticulture team took the trees down, realizing during the process that there were some great, usable sections of clear, straight pine among the timber they had collected.

The question then became how to best use the resources and give these trees new purpose. Being located here in the Pine Tree State, where around 90 percent of the state is forested, the gardens staff knew there must be a local solution. Enter Richard Hatch from Hatch Wood Products in Jefferson, who does custom milling and sawing. Hatch has 15 years of experience with a Wood-mizer sawmill.

This machine cuts the log, rolls it around, measures it and cuts it again, all to Hatch’s specifications which are entered into the saw-mill’s computer. Depending on the circumference of the log, the cuts are made differently to utilize the timber to its greatest potential, and get the best pieces of lumber without wasting any wood. The process is mesmerizing to watch in person, with sawmill, Hatch and his assistant John Donahue working in unison like a very well-oiled machine — which, of course, the sawmill is. Soon, the air smelled of pine wood and the half dozen white pines had been turned into a stack of lumber rivaling the quality of any we could have gotten from a lumber yard.

Although they needed to come down to improve our guests’ experience here at CMBG, the pines can now become a part of the Gardens in a different way. By giving the trees new life here on the grounds, there’s less lumber we need to ship in from other places, wasting less fuel and resources.

“This is a small step towards a larger goal of self-sustainability,” Executive Director William Cullina said,

Many of the gardens’ future building projects will require softwood for framing. From tool sheds around the gardens for the horticulture staff to larger educational buildings, the lumber created from the felled timber will give life to many new projects here at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens.