“Good quality wood doesn't grow in plantations. It grows in parklands.” Rowan Reid · Plant The Trees
September 2026
Reid has spent his career pruning some seventy species on his own Australian farm, and the line lands at the end of a long, practical explanation of why he prunes at all. His argument is that pruning lets you thin aggressively while the trees are small, so you never have to find a buyer for the low-grade wood that dominates industrial forestry — the problem he says the industry keeps trying to solve from the wrong end. The host had just raised the monoculture Douglas fir and pine plantations of the US as the same case.
Transcript
Traditionally, and I hesitate to use the word tradition, but my career has probably reflected a huge transition in forestry. I did forestry in 1980. I started studying forest science. At that time, all the industrial plantations, and they were largely American softwoods. And the reason for that is that for basic framing timber for a commodity product, eucalypts are very heavy, difficult to mill, difficult to dry. They were traditionally used in frames. The way they used to build a house frame of eucalypts, and I've seen the photos, it wasn't long before my time. They put up a hardwood frame when it was green, because when it was dry, you couldn't knock a nail in it. So they would put up the two befores as fresh from the forest, and then they would go and do the next house, the next house frame, and they wouldn't come back to that frame till the next year. And it all moved and buckled. And then they'd start cutting and straightening. And they probably spend quite a few days just straightening the frame. And you can see that in the old. Timber frames. So the softwood, particularly pine, pinus radiata, as it came to be our dominant species, very easy to dry, can be dried very, you know, weak in a kiln, stuck out on a building site, and they can be knocked up. The dry timber is easy to nail with a nail gun. You can't use a nail gun on a eucalypt timber, two before. And as a result, that was identified as a need. And we've got a million hectares of that. If you think about what the building industry needs, they need, or they don't care if it looks ugly, if it's got knots in it, as long as it passes the structural grades. So none of those plantations are pruned. It's all just for framing timber, you know, everything from what now three by one and a half almost. It's extraordinary how thin the frame material gets up to five or six, six inches by two inches, depending on what the climates are. So that's the predominant industrial market. All that was set up by the government in all the different states around and goes up to 100 years old. And then governments are progressively selling it off. And there has been some private development, but it's still largely the same type of forest. It's actually an American super fund that manage all the previously government-owned plantations in Victoria. You know, they've got their model, they've got their mills. Some of the mills are huge. You know, they're probably equivalent to your Pacific Northwest sawmills, sausage mills, we call them. Not really interested in a truckload of timber from a family farm. Certainly not interested at all. Can't fit it into their program. And don't care whether we prune because they can't do anything without the pruned clearwood. On the other side, there's another million hectares of eucalypts that are being planted predominantly just for the chipwood market. So the industrial forestry sector is only about 2 million hectares spread around the coast of Australia in most states, but it's quite targeted to one or two species or uses for that timber. And as a result, I think there's a huge gap in the market. For example, because they don't prune their radiata pine, when we were building this house, I wanted to buy some plywood. We used all our own radiata pine for the framing, but I can't make plywood, obviously. And when I went to buy some plywood, I ordered online to buy the Australian plywood. Thought it better support our industry. Turned up and the guy at the plywood shop came out with the forklift. And I said, that's not Australian radiata pine. And he said, no, you don't want the Australian stuff. That's it over there. It's all buckled. And I said, where does this come? He said, it comes from Chile. And I've been to Chile. They've got Pinus Radiata and they prune it. And a lot of our clearwood pine also comes from New Zealand, but no one really produces it here. So just in pine, there's a gap in the market. And with the hardwoods, only 13 kilometers away from here is, I think, one of the largest Australian importers of American white oak. They also bring in redwood and a range of other cherry and other species, particularly from Pennsylvania. And because no one really grows eucalypts for solid timber, and now that they've closed the native forests in at least two of the big states in Australia, no more harvesting of the public native forest, that market is now an opportunity for us as well.
I'm thinking about the Pacific Northwest and the vast monoculture plantations of Douglas fir. There's some red alder up that way. And then the pine plantations of the southeast, which are more for pulp on the whole, even though the pulp market waxes and wanes. I think it mostly left the southeast. And we have this overabundance of call it convenient but low quality pine that you're highlighting is the same case in Australia. And you mentioned pruning a few times. And I would guess that those listening are familiar with pruning fruit trees. And you heard about pruning fruit trees that can seem complicated. And I always tell people that pruning timber trees is way easier than pruning fruit trees. So it shouldn't be intimidating. Could you walk us through the process of pruning a timber tree?
I agree. I'm not very good at pruning fruit trees, but I've pruned thousands and thousands of trees for timber. We grow about 70 different species here. And I love trying to work out whether there's subtle differences in how you actually grow them. And so to put that in perspective, obviously we grow a lot of Australian natives, but that won't mean a lot to many of you US listeners. But to put it in the picture, we also prune our American black walnut, our coast redwoods. What have I got here? White oak, swamp white oak, hybrid poplar, red oak, pin oak, burr oak, U.S. ash, and all those species that we grow, which you're familiar with. Every one of them I prune. And the purpose for that is twofold. And I think people focus on pruning as a way to increase wood value. And of course, that's why we do it because by pruning the branches when they're small, and I'll explain a simple guide to how we might do it generally, you can confine the knots to the center of the tree. And if you prune up to a certain height, it might only be two and a half meters in a pear tree that I'm growing for wood turning, but it might be eight meters in a redwood that I'm growing for long lengths of high-quality timber. You can confine the knots in the center of the tree and then produce a log. I like logs over 80 centimeters in diameter, big logs, and they have plenty of what we call clearwood, a zone in the hardwood part of the tree that has no knots in it because you remove those branches when they're quite small. And we do that over a period of years when the tree is young. And once the tree is what you might call set, you finish the pruning, it's like set and forget. Don't forget it. Keep an eye on it and watch it grow and develop it into that size. And that gets to my main advantage of pruning is the reason why most industrial forestry or conventional forestry has a problem with that first thinning, that low quality, small diameter wood. And I listen to stuff in America and it's the same around the world. Family farmers, because of their scale, often because their distance to market, probably because the pulp mill, which was only 50 kilometers away, has now been bought out by a multinational, closed down and consolidated in another site. Because of the now the cost of diesel, because of the fact you need minimum number of loads to make log trucks work, and they've got to be big, big log trucks, you know, with B doubles, B triples and stuff. It means that if you don't prune, you're ending up with a lot of trees there in your young forest that you retain so that they can suppress the branches on the other trees so that the knots are small or with some species, the branches die and fall off. If you prune, you don't need that competition from the other trees. So you can cut them down when they're small with a little electric chainsaw, you know, 10 centimeter diamond ones. Having decided to prune one tree, I then basically commit to cut three other trees down that might be within, depending on the species, five, six, eight meters away from the tree that I prune. And all of a sudden, I don't have to think about finding a market for a small load of knotty, low-quality juvenile wood. And that's what dominates forestry thinking around the world. Right now, everyone's saying we need a market for this crap timber. And my view is don't grow crap timber. And that's really what it's come down to. So pruning to me, clearly it has these significant benefits just for the timber production side. But then think of all the other benefits you've got. You can grow an understory underneath because you don't have a dense monoculture. Your fire risk is reduced because you've broken the connectivity with the ground and the canopy. You can graze underneath because there's a bit more light and pasture, particularly in the early part of the year. Suddenly pruning opens up a totally different forest type and an opportunity. And you don't need that big consolidated square block of trees because you don't care about the edge trees. Everything's on an edge. It's an open parkland. And my view is I've started using this term a lot. Good quality wood doesn't grow in plantations. It grows in parklands. And I can see people who've managed parklands and they're growing really high quality timber.
Yeah, you might as well prune everything while it's easy to prune while it's small. Well, it's
easy.
And thin it out. Because if you're going to do that non-commercial thinning, whether it's pine or other species, or there's a term in the U.S. called chip and saw, where part of it goes to saw logs and most of it goes to chip. And if you look at the returns, just the economics on those two thinnings, you're not often covering operations to go in and do those non-commercial thinnings. So if you can take Loppers or an electric chainsaw, as you said, and just delete the trees that are never going to be anything commercial and grow grass instead, then that seems pretty reasonable for a smaller, medium-scale landowner.