Today is Arbor Day in Poland, a country whose surface area is nearly 40 percent forest and the home to the last remaining primaeval forest, which once covered the entirety of the European Plain. Beech, birch, three varieties of oak, Norway spruce, and English yew trees are native to the country of 37 million people, but it’s the Scots Pine that covers nearly three-quarters of Poland’s forests. Its bark is thick and flaky, and a mature example has a long, bare, straight trunk (perfect for harvesting) topped by a flat mass of foliage. As you’re reading this, you might be one of the nearly one billion annual customers of IKEA, the flat-pack furniture giant headquartered in Sweden. More than half of the wood IKEA uses in its products is pine (with birch being a distant second at 17 percent) and company sources 28 percent of that wood from Poland itself.
NCPA
