Tree Poachers Cut and Run on U.S. Parkland in Capital

A band of chain saw-wielding thieves is busy in Washington-area woods, stealing trees whose black market value is in the thousands of dollars, U.S. Park Police officials say.

Their targets are paulownia trees, sweet-smelling specimens whose branches sprout heart-shaped leaves and lavender trumpet-shaped flowers in the spring. Also known in Asia as the empress or princess tree, the paulownia is prized for its durable wood, which is especially popular in Japan for making musical instruments and ceremonial wedding chests and can bring as much as $10,000 a tree.

Park Police said that in the last four months they have arrested more than a dozen people, many of them from the Culpeper area of Virginia, for allegedly cutting paulownias from National Park Service property. Most of the thefts have occurred in broad daylight--a departure from the nocturnal mode of operation that paulownia thieves have favored in past years.

The trees, indigenous to China and brought to the United States in the 19th Century, have dwindled in number because of mass poaching in recent years, said Peter Beckjord, a forest specialist who heads the National Paulownia Center in Beltsville, Md.

“That’s why the thieves are getting bolder and bolder,” Beckjord said.

Police said they are investigating what happens to the trees once they are poached. One possibility, Park Police Officer Kevin B. Fornshill said, is that they are milled into lumber in this country and shipped to Asia. Some paulownias in the Washington area are more than 100 years old.

Japan’s population of paulownia trees was reduced severely by a virus during the 1960s and ‘70s, Beckjord said.