GOOD FORESTRY
Our story started with guitars, but underneath it is the wood itself. Good wood is getting rarer and more valuable every year. Making bowls from what can’t become an instrument is one way to use what we have well. Caring for the forests we have, and growing the ones we’ll need later, is the other. If we’re going to work with wood, we should be working for the next forest too.
INVESTING in the FOREST
SIGLO TONEWOODS
Siglo was set up in 2015 to conserve, restore and grow one of Hawaiʻi’s great trees: the koa.
Koa is getting scarce in Hawaiʻi. At Siglo we’re working to protect what’s left and bring more back. We collect seed, grow it in our orchard, plant it, and let the forest recover around it. The goal is simple: koa with a future, for the guitar wood we mill at Pacific Rim Tonewoods and for our bowls too. Every tree we plant is a small step toward that.
Siglo Tonewoods
Reforesting Hawaiʻi's Koa
UTOPIA PROJECT
The story of our maple bowls starts long before the lathe. It starts with a question.
In 2014 we asked whether figured big leaf maple, the kind woodworkers have prized for generations, could be grown on purpose instead of just found. Figured maple is naturally rare. At our greenhouse near Birdsview, WA, we propagate cuttings from figured trees so this wood can be cultivated rather than only cut. It’s a long-term bet on healthier forests, and on being able to make bowls like these for a long time.
Utopia Project
Growing Figured Maple
Full Circle Forestry
Good forestry means thinking past the wood we need this year. It means looking after the whole life of the forest, and the land and people around it. For us that’s growing seedlings, planting trees, hiring locally, buying wood from people who manage their land well, and using what we have carefully. Do that long enough and the forests, and the wood, are still here.
Maple from this valley, turned into bowls.