Fearn The Alder - cultivation & uses

part of Spring Prompt 3, from one of 20 modules of 'Ogham Prompts'

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Cultivating Alder Trees

Alder can be one of our robust environmental savers due to how the trees can restore soils and interlock roots to prevent soil erosion. Alder trees love water so it can tolerate soils that hold lots of water, and boggy soils, Alder does not like the soil to be acidic peaty bog, though.

Alders trees are exceptional for reclaiming polluted land, as long as it is not over acidic. It is a perfect tree for planting over an open cast mine area when the miners pull out, for example.

Alder trees love to be beside water, but when the trees are not growing along rivers or beside lakes, they easily form alder woods, especially on any wet or swampy ground. The alder trunks spread into wide bases, and from those bases thickets of alder shoots often emerge, and grow up into tall straight trunks. These additional trunks quickly expand into thick leafy canopies, often waterproof, overhead.

Alder trees seem to grow in any light but it’s water that is more important for these trees.

It is essential to keep alders far away from water supply pipes and drains, though, as their roots will reach out to them and quickly destroy them.

Budding of Alder trees is early. Purple pointed buds are already present at the end of branches when leaves fall at the end of October or early November. These buds eventually open into leaves from mid April into early May.

Alder trees deep purple catkins form early, during mid to late August, and stay on the trees through winter. During the following spring the Alder catkins expand and lighten into a pinky golden colour as their flowers emerge. Some folks pick and cook up these catkins from January to April as part of their once essential Spring foraging.

Alder is the only broadleaved hard wood tree that grows cones as fruit. These cones grow on the trees alongside the hanging catkins through winter and the cones are a favourite winter food of green finches.

Alder tree plants are abundant with nitrogen-fixing nodules on their roots. This improves and restores soil fertility more than most other plants can. The Alder root’s conversion of nitrogen into ammonia, within soil, effectively turns poor soil into highly nutritious soil that can feed many other plants that grow close to Alder trees.

So Alder trees are ideal for reclaiming degraded soils and industrial pollution waste, such as at slag heaps.

Alder trees are a huge benefit when they are grown near Pines, Spruce and Fir trees as those evergreens tend to leach nitrogen into the soil that becomes nitrous oxide when it contacts water. This obviously lowers the quality of water that drains from those evergreen plantations into our precious natural water systems.

When Alder trees and their roots are near these plantation trees there are chemical reactions, from alder's roots, that can convert the nitrogen leached from spruce and fir trees into actually improve soil structure and, surprisingly, improve water quality rather than pollute it. 

established raparian buffer

Alder trees are a very important tree species within riparian buffer woodland projects between farmland and waterways, and equally so between tree plantations and waterways.

Coppicing?

Coppicing of Alder is becoming popular again due to a growing popularity of wood chip fuel.

A wood chip fuel boiler, or furnace, requires well dried and chipped wood fuel and Alder is one of the favourite tree resources for this. This may be a surprise because as a log burning fuel, Alder is not a good choice.

Alder can produce a coppiced crop every 3 to 5 years with 4 years being the most common.

Crafting Alder Wood

For quite some time alder was avoided and considered an inferior wood by woodturning and other woodworking crafts. But with the greatly reduced access to other hard woods, Alder wood has become more and more popular during tha past 50 years. Alder’s reddish brown wood has now become quite fashionable for bowl, plate, and other woodturning crafts today.

Woodworkers are also enjoying Alder's softness and workability, that’s almost as easy to work with as sycamore.

The living wood of alder is a pale colour but it quickly turns a deep orange to red when cut. This gave the impression of the tree wood bleeding. That developed into all sorts of fearful superstitions about the Alder wood. 

That orange to red colour, fresh after sawing and chopping, does eventually fade into a rich light brown colour, that has become enjoyed by woodturners and furniture makers.

alder woodworm

Furniture made from Alder wood does need to be protected from wood worm, though. The queen beetle of woodworms apparently prefers Alder over any other wood as the place to lay her eggs.

Alder wood is not widely used in home and building construction but woodworking projects in water has made Alder very valuable. When Alder wood is in water it becomes harder and stronger.

alder foundations of Venice

Alder was the perfect wood for creating the foundations of the buildings of Venice.

Alder’s wood does not rot in wet conditions and indeed becomes as hard as stone when left immersed in water. People have made good use of Alder, due to it’s stone like property in water, since the Bronze Age.

The foundations of Crannochs, or Crannogs, wooden strongholds for communities on man made islands, in loughs and lochs, are piles of alder trunks. 

Similar uses of Alder wood in water continued well into the Industrial Revolution when Alder wood became very popular making canal lock gates and other canal features. 

Out of water, Alder wood rots easily, hence why it is not suitable for building construction uses or fencing. 

From Medieval times, Alder became a popular wood for harp making. It is said that O'Carolan's harp frame was made of Alder wood.

Many whistles and flutes have also been made with Alder due to a mythology connection to the ravens who seem to love to sit on the top of alder trees, as I described in my Alder story poem. 

There is a strong belief that whistles of alder are as healing and transforming. Making harps from Alder wood for awhile, may have been an attempt to make the music from Alder made harps healing and transforming too.

Perhaps the most famous music instruments to be built with alder are the Fender Stratocaster and Telecaster guitars. Fender swear that it is the Alder wood that fixes the tone of their electric guitars and not their pick ups. Several other guitar makers have now switched to making their guitars with Alder wood. Mahogany wood is now hardly ever used in guitar making, so that’s an environmental plus. In Scotland, Alder wood is sometimes refered to as being Scottish Mahogany. 

Three dyes can be obtained from alder.

I have mentioned earlier about the catkins providing a green dye that is associated as being the source of green for fairies, and even elves

Alder flowers and young stalks give a golden yellow dye.

Alder bark provides a purplish dye colour, once used for royal purposes.

Wood Fuel?

Alder is often sold as firewood due to its abundance, easy access, low cost and good profit margin for sellers. But Alder wood is far from ideal as a log fuel fuel for heating, unless very well cured. 

Alder wood does make excellent charcoal, though, that burns with an intense heat. Alder wood was extremely popular for charcoal making during the Iron Age, to forge very hard wearing weapons. 

Later Alder charcoal was used in the manufacture of gunpowder. There is an area near Manorhamilton, Co. Leitrim that made most of Ireland’s gunpowder, partially due to an abundance of Alder trees. Alder coppices are also easily established with abundant plantations established next to gunpowder factories.

The oily smoke from Alder charcoal is perfect for smoking salmon and other fish and shellfish.

Alder wood has now become very popular as a wood chip fuel, but does need to be very well dried, cured, to make this fuel possible. Alder as a wood chip fuel is also popular due to the excellent potential yields from coppicing management.

Should you insist on still using Alder wood for fuel, maybe because not other wood is easily available, it is an easy wood to chop and split.

Alder wood is usually not easy to ignite, though, andf needs a lot of other wood kindling to fire it up. Whatever way Alder wood is ignited it tends to smoulder at first and is a challenging wood to get warming flames from. Once the Alder wood gets burning it is usually quite smokey, and sparks a bit too.

Even the best dried Alder does not give off the heat that other woods do. Also, very dry Alder is quite fast burning. It is always better to spend a bit more cash on a better wood fuel that burns slower, gives more heat, and actually becomes the best value choice.

Wood chip fuel used in boiler furnaces made for the job is a different matter and can be quite economical, especially if you grow, coppice, dry and chip your own wood.

To kiln dry Alder wood, you would need dry shed with racks to stack the alder wood on, plus a device to blow air through the logs. It takes a year to turn green alder into wood chip quality alder.

Really, wood chips and pellets are best for serving heat to schools, hospitals, retreat centres and communities rather than for individual homes so investment is returned in just a couple of years.

Following shortly is Part 5, some Food and Remedies uses of Alder.

All of my 20 Ogham Prompts are now linked up for easy reference in one place … gazetteer