The Dead Tree Hunters and the Wood Wizard

Osvaldo Brondello and his handful of dead tree hunters they really look like something out of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. No ingredient is missing: the inspiration and stubbornness of the protagonist, a distant but close place like Borgo San Dalmazzo, in the province of Cuneo, and a magic wood. Magical because, as Brondello recalls, “a piece of wood is not completely owned, it is kept and handed down”. A bit like his sawmill, Brondello Erminio, founded by his grandfather in 1929. “They say I’m a poet, rather than an entrepreneur. Maybe it’s true, but when my father passed away in the ’80s, I was forced by events to make a life choice. And in this choice I put my heart, love for this land, respect for the men who work there and for our planet”.

The difficulty of describing what this company actually creates is the same as describing a material work of art. Wood is a material of anyone’s daily life, but the old wood recovered from a forest where the wind has uprooted everything, or from the roof of a cabin, they belong to another world. A place of reality – increasingly distant from the metropolitan dimension – where one is captivated by the natural chromatic nuances and the vibrations given by the sliding of the fingertips on the wooden fabric. Really, it is as if the parquet or commonly used furniture were the expression of a hyper-realistic taste, and the tables of this artisan company are pure imperfect nature – where imperfection does not mean inexperience, but correspondence to the reality of things.

The aesthetic appeal of parquet, wall coverings and furniture is debatable, but it must be recognized that old wood clearly has more personality and elements of uniqueness than young wood. “However, net of beauty, which is attributable to personal taste, what really matters is that with this approach fewer trees are cut, less pollution is generated and thanks to a process that I have personally developed, with the contribution of various institutions of research, we obtain a resistant, stable, certified wood with superior insulating capacity”, underlines Brondello.

The tree hunters that the woods like

The hunters of dead trees, mostly distributed in Piedmont and Liguria, are a watchful eye on the territory. Not quite like the three-eyed raven from Game of Thrones, but something like that. In fact, word has spread that a sawmill buys scrap wood, fallen trees in the woods, piles accumulated behind a granary, the beams of a cottage and even the old nailed parquet floors. Mountains of ugly and repelling wood, apparently.

“Recovering that useless wood seems crazy, but it’s right. Right for these woods and for those who know how nature works. When they call me for a woodland intervention, if I see something interesting, I call Mr. Brondello, he then starts ‘agreement with the owners of the land and I intervene”, explains the woodcutter Luca Coletto. And the side effect of this recovery operation is that – as Luca Occelli explains, another lookout for the area – removing fallen, sick and dead trees gives space to the youngest and facilitates their growth, improving forestry. There “cleaning” of a forest moreover it is one of the best methods to increase the production of oxygen and pass on not only its value but also favor the ecosystem, with all the positive consequences on the environment, fauna and the local economy.

“I’m not against the felling of trees because they too are subject to a complete biological cycle, but it should be limited and there is little point in importing so much from abroad when Italy is not lacking. Of course, in France there is quality and organization , while in Eastern Europe the prices are competitive and in China… oh well let’s forget it, but here throughout the foothills there is durmast, oak, chestnut, elm, poplar, walnut, maple, pine, fir, larch. Nothing is missing,” says Brondello.

The central theme, as the entrepreneur recalls, is that the most widespread aesthetic taste rewards purified wood, perhaps even washed out, and this fits perfectly with intensive forestry based on the felling of young trees: it is difficult not to grasp an economic link between the things. “The idea of ​​recovery is not the only right idea to improve the woods and the environment; there is no point in being a fundamentalist. There are forestry plans and in Italy they have also worked quite well for several decades”, says the entrepreneur.

Working with dead wood

The entrance to the Brondello sawmill is anonymous, almost hidden in the middle of two-storey buildings overlooking the state road which cuts Borgo San Dalmazzo in two. The way forward is olfactory. Along the left side of the area there are small sheds dedicated to the individual processing stages; on the right side there are trunks, roots, lumber of various kinds organized by type.

“The first phase is that of cleaning, with pressurized water, and in the case of beams we use the metal detector to locate and remove screws or nails”, explains the entrepreneur. “Then we saw everything into planks of different sizes, it depends on what we are dealing with and the potential use the final. But what really matters is the next step: the disinfection and normalization“. In practice, to obtain stable material suitable for the needs of carpenters and architects, the wood is first placed in a sort of Turkish bath and then subjected to drying in an oven to clean and disinfect it at high temperature.

“These are phases that can last dozens of days, depending on the type of wood and the result to be obtained. The damp bathroom normalizes the whole axis, in fact a beam could have been subjected to atmospheric agents and partially to domestic heat. In addition, 100% humidity disinfects creating an environment hostile to xylophagous insects. In the second phase we proceed with the positioning in convection oven to stabilize everything with drying”.

The result is a more “crystalline” wood with i purified woody vessels and therefore capable, depending on the processing refinements – therefore the wet bath and drying recipe – of leaning towards thermal insulation or heat transfer. The subsequent use of waxes or other natural impregnating agents gives other characteristics, including the deep impermeability of the wood and the zeroing of any maintenance intervention.

“I respect the whole wood cycle and even the ovens are fed through the shavings and sawdust recovered from the aspiration of the same micro-waste that is produced during processing. Nothing of the wood is thrown away. Maybe it’s because in these planks and trees in general I see values ​​to be protected and handed down”, concludes Brondello.