Wild Thyme Farm adjoins some of the most productive forests on earth. Over a thousand square miles of prime commercial timber land stretches from the Chehalis River to the Pacific Ocean.

At first, we had no idea what to do with our 100 acres of forest and we had no experience in forestry, so we left it alone, happy to own a small piece of the great Pacific Northwest rainforest. Surrounded by thousands of acres of recent clear-cuts, it was unthinkable for us to convert our young alder forest into another monocultured Douglas fir plantation, according to the conventional wisdom of the time.

The ice storm of 1996 showed us that our hands-off approach was a poor forest management option as well. Like the forest fires raging through overstocked stands across the west, nearly 30 acres of our tall, spindly, un-thinned alders went down like dominoes in one day. Had we heavily thinned the alder around 1988 when pulp prices were sky-high, we would have encouraged fewer but larger crowned alders that would have better weathered the ice storm, to be harvestable starting in 2002 when alder lumber prices reached record highs. Our ignorance and inaction cost us that valuable income. And instead of a mature, valuable alder forest in our western unit, we now have a brushy zone dominated by salmonberry and elderberry and a bumper crop of short-lived wildlife trees, with a long and expensive rehabilitation process ahead of us. This was our wake-up call to become educated and actively involved with our forestlands.

Visionary forestry was born out of our desire to preserve and honor the forest while creatively drawing from its abundance. To be successful on a wider scale, it must also be economically viable as an alternative to large scale clear-cutting.