The harvest
Many donors manifested a desire to donate their oaks to restore the cathedral: private individuals, local authorities, the State through the National Forests Office, and cooperatives. A new adventure in generosity! France Bois Forêt, the national interprofessional union for timber, proposed to coordinate the harvesting of these trees in association with the public establishment.
Oak selection was based on a list of the necessary pieces of timber established by project management based on Viollet-le-Duc's plans. Many of these pieces present exceptional dimensions: some, being perfectly straight, had to be longer than 20 meters with a square section of 40 x 40 cm!
They had to work fast: to present the best technical properties, the wood had to be harvested in time frames that would allow it to dry naturally in order to lose a large share of the water and sap it contained.
Once the trees had been pre-selected, architects, forest experts, representatives of the National Forests Office and sawyers met in the forest to confirm their choices and to mark the oak trees. They had to imagine the future beam inside the trunk of the tree standing before them! The thousand oak trees chosen were then harvested, beginning March 2021.
Transport and sawing
When the fine weather came, the trees were hauled out of the forest and transported to sawmills all over France, many of which were also sponsors. They were then cut to the dimensions of the prescribed timber pieces in order to obtain beams that could then be worked by the carpenters. Finally, the wood was dried: it dried for a few months in order to reduce the level of humidity.
In 2022, the beams arrived in the carpentry workshops to be carved and assembled, the first step in the rebirth of the spire. At the same time, a second harvest took place to provide the oak trees necessary to reconstruct the framework of the nave and choir dating from the 13th century, using techniques dating from that period.
Main visual ©David Bordes / RNDP
