Dear Matt, I sincerely appreciate Dr. Richard Jagels's accessibility and collegiality in answering technical questions I had about various woods of Australia and Japan (WB No. 290). I also admire his openness, as a scientist, to the beliefs of craftspeople with regard to materials, even when those beliefs might not be readily confirmed scientifically. As Dr. Jagels noted, Japanese cedar is almost universally used by boatbuilders in Japan, but I write to share one exception: boatbuilders in the adjoining Kiso and Nagara river valleys use a wood called koyamaki or maki, aka Japanese umbrella pine. I used this material for the first time when building a cormorant fishing boat in 2017 under the direction of 85-year-old Seiichi Nasu. I shared my latest book on building this boat with Dr. Jagels, and he added the following: "Koyamaki (Sciadopitys verticillate) is one of the strangest trees in the world. At one time it was put in the Tax-odiaceae family (the thinking was that it was somehow related to redwood, bald cypress, and dawn redwood). But now taxonomists have put it in its own family (Sciadopityaceae). It is an ancient species and, like dawn redwood, is the last survivor of a tree once widespread over Europe and North America. What look like leaves that form a whorl like the spokes of an umbrella are thought to be cladodes (modified shoots) by some botanists or the fusion of two leaves by other botanists. The true leaves are tiny, scale-like, non-photosynthetic brown appendages. Sciadopitys, like Metasequoia, is a poor competitor in modern forests, likely explaining the relic status of each. Unlike Metasequoia, it is also a very slow-growing tree. I have a Sciadopitys tree growing in my yard (along with bald cypress and several dawn redwoods)."
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