Custom Walking Stick

I was honored today when a new friend, Paul Lewis, provided me with a custom carved walking stick. Paul uses “moose maple” (acer pensylvanicum) for his walking sticks because the bark remains intact, regardless of it’s age. Paul carves interesting and pertinent designs on the sticks, that will be meaningful to the owner.

In the case of this stick, Paul has carved the word Ulgedook, along with some fern leaves, an arrow, and a star - all in keeping with Mi’kmaq traditions.

I sincerely thank Paul for this walking stick, which will be used earnestly, and will join some other sticks that I have obtained over the years.

Here is some information about the type of wood Paul uses.

Acer pensylvanicum (striped maple, also known as moosewood and moose maple) is a species of maple native to northern forests in eastern North America from southern Ontario east to Nova Scotia and south to Wisconsin, Ohio, and New Jersey, and also at higher elevations in the Appalachian Mountains south to northern Georgia.

It is a small deciduous tree growing to 5–10 m tall, with a trunk up to 20 cm diameter. The young bark is striped with green and white, and when a little older, brown. The leaves are broad and soft, 8–15 cm long and 6–12 cm broad, with three shallow forward-pointing lobes. The fruit is a samara; the seeds are about 27 mm long and 11 mm broad, with a wing angle of 145° and a conspicuously veined pedicel.

Moosewood is an understory tree of cool, moist forests, often preferring slopes. It is among the most shade-tolerant of deciduous trees, capable of germinating and persisting for years as a small understory shrub, then growing rapidly to its full height when a gap opens up. However, it does not grow high enough to become a canopy tree, and once the gap above it closes through succession, it responds by flowering and fruiting profusely, and to some degree spreading by vegetative reproduction.

The wood is soft and considered undesirable among maples. Although ecologically there is no reason to consider it a pest, foresters sometimes consider the striped maple to be unwanted, often cutting it or applying herbicides to kill it. Its shade tolerance makes it difficult to control, as it is often present in great numbers in the understory.