"The World's Largest Burl" (unofficial), partially burned in an accident last summer.
Port McNeill, British Columbia, is a small harbor town on the northern end of Vancouver Island. Sporting a population of 2,356 with a small main street and daily ferries out to surrounding islands, it is a regional hub. Port McNeill’s primary industry is logging. It is this industry that has made Port McNeill home to not one but two enormous tree burls.
A tree burl is a natural but abnormal outgrowth of wood cells in the cambial layer of a tree, which sits just under the bark. They are akin to a benign tumor– structurally odd, but not in and of themselves dangerous to a tree. Many types of trees form burls, generally in response to stress, injury or disturbance, ranging from insect damage to environmental toxins. While the whorled, twisted wood is too structurally odd for use in lumber, burls are in great demand by furniture makers, bowl turners, and for veneers. Redwood tree burls– which are both huge and common to the species– are so valuable that few have been left preserved. (Burls cannot be reliably harvested from living trees, and harvesting them means cutting the tree down.)
The incredible price of Redwood burls is why the world’s largest preserved burl is The Ronning Burl, a 33 ton, 6 meter wide burl cut from the trunk of a 525 year old Sitka Spruce in 2005 (previously mentioned: The Loneliest Tree in the World). This burl was moved from northern Vancouver Island to a small pavilion build for this purpose near the Port McNeill waterfront, unseating the previous “World’s Largest Burl” (still labelled as such on its informational plaquard), which sits 5 minutes north of town on Highway 19. This first burl weighs 22 tons, and was cut from a 351 year old spruce in town in 1976. It was coated in fiberglass to prevent rotting in 1997.
The story would end here– a pair of rival roadside attractions in a small logging town– except that The Ronning Burl burned just last summer.
Around 11 pm on Wednesday, May 17, 2023, a pair of individuals (by all accounts, teens) were seen with a fuel can walking towards the burl. Edit- thanks @dog- teens predictably absolved of arson in later news reports, blaze now deemed an accidental cigarette-butt fire. By the time fire crews arrived, the viewing platform was ashes and the burl itself was well underway. Despite the ministrations of fire trucks, the dense, fuel-rich wood didn’t stop smouldering until morning, at which point it had been dramatically reduced in scale.
Still, some Port McNeill locals have rallied to rebuild the shelter for the burl, into which they hope to reinstall the charred wood remains. As former mayor Gaby Wikstrom said on Twitter; “To some, it might be a silly piece of wood. But others know this natural oddity draws visitors to our community.”
