Each year, hundreds of trees die in Montgomery County parks and are removed by urban foresters. Salvageable wood from those trees is given a new life by being offered for sale to the public.

This year’s urban wood sale takes place this Saturday, Dec. 9 and Sunday, Dec. 10 in Gaithersburg, with individual pieces of lumber ranging in price from $5 to $400. There’s a special guest of sorts at the sale this year: wood from the historic Linden Oak, which was cut down over the summer.

Patrick Harwood, an urban forester with Montgomery Parks, says it’s all part of an effort to recycle or reuse all green waste produced in county parks.

“We take that waste and we recycle it to the highest order of value,” Harwood explains. That means that any logs that are in good shape are milled, dried, and put to use. It adds up to roughly 100,000 board ft. of lumber per year, Harwood says.

Much of the lumber is used in projects around the park system, including park benches and furniture in Montgomery Parks’ headquarters. What isn’t used internally is put on sale. This is the third annual urban wood sale — in previous years, the event has been extremely popular, with long lines forming outside the warehouse where the sale takes place.

Salvaging lumber from dead trees has climate benefits, keeping carbon sequestered in the wood. It also helps connect residents with their local parks, Harwood says.

“It’s a great touch point for the community. It allows people to be able to take home a piece of the park,” Harwood says.

The wood on offer is not what you’d find at your local big-box hardware store or lumber yard — most of it is in unique shapes and sizes. Many boards have live edges, meaning the edge is not milled straight, but left with the natural waviness from the tree’s trunk or limb — sometimes with the bark still intact. The wood has been planed so it’s flat, and cut to thicknesses of between 3/4 inches and 3 inches.

Numerous species of wood are for sale, including walnut, cedar, pine, poplar, oak, beech, cherry, cypress, and ash. The amount and type of wood available varies from year to year, depending on what is happening in local ecosystems. In recent years, there was a glut of ash wood, for example, as ash forests were decimated by the emerald ash borer. Now, most mature ash trees in the county have already been killed, so there is much less ash available.

Most of the wood has been dried, so it’s ready for your DIY project. Some of the lumber, though, is still green, meaning it needs to be dried at home.

The Linden Oak, thought to be about 300 years old when it died, was the largest white oak in the county. After it was cut down in July, Montgomery Parks staff worked to save as much wood from it as possible.

“It was in pretty poor health,” says Harwood. “We ended up salvaging a number of smaller-diameter limbs of the upper canopy, and we’ve cut a number of cookies, which are just cut on the cross sections of the tree as opposed to linearly like a like a standard piece of wood.”

The lumber from the Linden Oak has not yet been dried. Some of it is being offered for sale this year, green, while some will be dried and likely put up for sale next year.

A large section of the Linden Oak trunk is not being milled or sold — rather, it’s being transformed into a chainsaw sculpture that will be on display at Ken-Gar Park in Kensington. That sculpture is slated to be unveiled this Thursday.

The sale takes place this weekend, Dec. 9 and 10, from 8:00 a.m. to noon, or until supplies run out. It’s held at the Montgomery Parks Green Farm Maintenance Facility, 8301 Turkey Thicket Drive, Gaithersburg, MD 20879.