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While towns try to manage growth, the woods' future now lies with people like Neal Dow.

By JOHN RICHARDSON Staff Writer July 9, 2007

STANDISH — Neal Dow walks through a stretch of woods as though he's admiring a vegetable garden that's growing in extremely slow motion.

He proudly points up at tall white pines that took decades to grow. He also points down to small oak seedlings that someday will tower overhead -- or at least he hopes they will.

Dow is one of thousands of woodlot owners who together own 4.5 million acres of southern and western Maine and periodically cut trees that supply lumberyards and paper mills. While town officials and planners try to manage the residential development pressure on rural southern and western Maine, the future of the forests for now lies in the hands of a lot of people such as Dow.

Dow hopes his trees keep growing long after he's gone, but he understands the pressure to sell, a decision that invariably turns woodlots into house lots or subdivisions.

"It seems like as fast as they can buy the land, it gets developed," Dow says.

The forests in the 10 southern and western counties of Maine are being converted into other uses -- mostly residential subdivisions -- at a rate of nearly six square miles a year, according to Maine Forest Service data.

Standish, just 15 miles northwest of Portland, has witnessed the trend firsthand. The town's population grew 29 percent from 1990 to 2005, when it was estimated to reach 9,915.

The fast-growing bedroom community still has a lot of working forest that it wants to protect, however.

Standish is testing a new planning tool it hopes will slow development of its rural woodlands, and that may be copied in other southern Maine towns. Called a differential growth cap, it means only 25 of the 85 building permits it issues each year can be used in the town's rural zone. It took effect July 1.

Dow grew up in Casco village at a time when many Mainers lived in villages surrounded by undeveloped country. The retired truck driver and his wife have lived in Standish for several decades and have seen it grow into a suburb.

Dow inherited about 1,300 acres of timberland scattered in Standish and surrounding towns from his uncle, who had bought former farmland and heavily cut woods in the 1940s and 1950s. He has patiently restored the woods with the help of a forester who manages his trees with an eye on future production, as well as on protecting the streams, ponds and wildlife habitats.

For the woodlot owner, Dow said, owning and growing trees is a hobby that pays for itself; but it doesn't make anyone wealthy.

Dow and Rene Noel, the forester who manages his woodlots, grow excited as they walk toward a lone white pine. It's more than 100 feet tall, perfectly straight, with a large crown of needles on top. It's the kind of tree that hundreds of years ago would have been marked with an X and cut down to make a ship's mast. Now it will provide high-quality wood for cabinets or furniture.

"That pine tree is what a forester dreams about," Noel said.

It took 100 years to grow and will be ready to cut the next time loggers visit the land. In today's market, the tree would sell for about $100 to $150.

Income from logging covers the expenses and the tax bill, which is reduced under a state incentive program based on Dow's commitment to keep producing timber.

"Yeah, you can keep ahead of the taxes," Dow said, but he added, "You'd have to have quite a few acres if you were going to use this to make a living."

Loggers return to his woodlots once every 10 to 15 years and remove about one-third of the standing timber. It's sold for lumber or pulp for making paper.

A typical 50-acre woodlot might generate an annual income of $1,000 to $2,000, according to Gary Bahlkow, a timberland manager and broker for LandVest in Portland. The numbers can vary dramatically depending on the land and how aggressively it is cut.

In the real estate market, meanwhile, 50 acres in Standish could sell for $150,000 to $200,000, he...