Trees have been on my mind and in my heart for a long time.

My name is Jeffrey Greene.

I am a grower of art and my medium is fungi and the forest. 

Most of my childhood and teenage years were spent in central Massachusetts building forts in the woods, traipsing through swamps and simply exploring the outdoors on endless adventures. I’ve always been curious and easily soaked up what nature had to teach.

At 12 years old, I remember my father showing me the remains of a magnificent chestnut tree that had fallen to the blight decades earlier. He explained how an invasive species arrived through imported cultivated trees and destroyed a dominant and useful tree species. This made an impression on me and was the beginning of my awareness of human impact on the ecology in the forest.

This was also around the time when I first discovered spalting but I didn’t know it. One day while splitting birch logs for firewood, and expecting to find plain white wood inside, I was astounded to discover the wood inside was filled with lines and colors. I managed to carve a small smooth board, which I still treasure. At the time, I didn’t realize the marvels of spalting, but I liked it! 

I’ve always been a designer and builder, from my first job building  tennis courts to later working as a carpenter building homes. After an epic seven year career as a ski bum, I studied architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. I built the next phase of my professional career working with several architecture firms in New York and Pennsylvania. My years working as a carpenter were key to my success in architecture - I was able to view projects from both perspectives. 

While working at a mid-sized architectural firm, I was asked to design and build a sculpture in a highly distressed town in Western Pennsylvania. I was moved beyond measure by the poverty and lack of opportunity I saw in neighborhoods riddled with crime and despair, only 15 minutes from where I lived. This created a turning point in my life. 

I felt called to work on social justice and moved into the epicenter of a distressed neighborhood. I spent the next 15 years investing in refurbishing buildings, genuinely connecting with people, confronting systemic barriers and envisioning a better way.

The community was primarily African American and earning the community’s trust took many years. I never gave up because I saw the hope– that investing in young men by building their self esteem and skills, had a profound impact on keeping them away from violence and out of the judicial system.

To assist with rehabilitating old buildings, I acquired a portable bandsaw mill, thus fulfilling a lifelong dream. This purchase was the beginning of a new endeavor that I would continue long after my community development work had ended. 

I happened to cut up a maple log that had been laying on the ground, evidently, for quite some time. It was full of spalting and I recognized it immediately! It was at that moment when I committed to learning as much as I could about it. I determined that if I could do it accidentally, then I could do it intentionally. 

At that time, it seemed that no one was doing spalting at scale, and I was convinced I could bring a significant aesthetic product to the design community. I harvested 44 ten foot logs from the property of a friend, and I worked with a local Amish family using horses to drag the logs from deep in the forest to where they could be picked up by a log truck. 

Once I had the logs back in my community, I inoculated them with fungi and waited three years until they were ready to cut with my trusty bandsaw mill. These logs, harvested with gratitude and care, nurtured in the most under-resourced neighborhood in the county, grew fungal patterns of incomparable beauty– a metaphor for the achievable transformation when care and belief are combined. While fighting city hall was not as successful as I once dreamed, the love and support I shared with those I grew close with in the community remains with me still.

And this is how Deep Greene Woodworks came to be; I happened upon the perfect maple log, at the perfect time and from it, created a company that is built upon the foundation of knowledge and passion for nature, design and an inextinguishable quest to find the most responsible, sustainable way of bringing nature’s purest beauty into the design community. You could say, I was just letting nature take its course. I am grateful that I can choose to devote my life’s work into growing art in wood for sustainable surfaces everywhere…