MOANALUA — Craig Swedberg ran one of his beefy hands across the contours of the wooden bench, the artist in him marveling at the beauty he had found inside a half-ton kiawe log.

The shapes of a dolphin and a whale. The colors of sunlit whiskey and dark chocolate. The solid feel of flexed muscle.

"I like to go with the flow of the grain or the bends that are already in the wood," Swedberg said. "It is easy to square cut something. But I think you get more natural enhancement of beauty if you can make a free-flowing piece and use the grain of the wood to emphasize the movement."

Logged kiawe rarely ends up looking this nice. Most of the time, it becomes firewood. But here, at the edge of Moanalua Gardens, Swedberg has given new life to trees that grew at the park for nearly 100 years before safety concerns prompted their removal.

Even in one of the greenest places in the city, it's a novel recycling project.

The Hau'ula woodworker took five half-dead kiawe trees — each one mangled decades ago by bad pruning — and turned them into benches, chairs, tables and sculptures. Since he began in June, using chainsaws, grinders and chisels, Swedberg has created a dozen pieces and is currently working on five more.

They blend in with the greenery of the 24-acre park.

"The nice thing about the organic forms, all the pieces look like they belong," he said. "If you put cement or regular picnic tables in the park they would stick out like sore thumbs. The organic forms go with the whole majesty of the trees and the park."

RECYCLING WOOD

Swedberg, 48, has found ways to recycle wood since he was a Kailua teenager climbing into Dumpsters behind cabinet shops for scraps or collecting driftwood on the beach. He would make boxes, religious crosses and canoe paddles inlaid with handcarved designs.

The practice became a habit. Sometimes he found logs on the side of the road and took them home — though at times they turned into compost before he could carve them.

After he became a carpenter, Swedberg never lost his passion for turning roadside flotsam into furniture.

"I've always liked kiawe," said Swedberg, who sports a mane of red hair and a wild red beard. "A lot of people tend to think of it only as firewood or are scared of it because it is hard. People generally don't want to work with it. It is brutal on your tools."

The kiawe trees had been growing along Pineapple Place. Sloppy pruning years ago had turned them into stumps about 10 feet tall and as wide as four feet, said J.P. Damon, president of Kaimana Ventures, which owns the park.

In some places, branches had grown out of the stumps, including one large branch that hung precariously over the wooden roof of the Moanalua Gardens Foundation offices. Some of the others loomed 15 feet to 25 feet above the ground.

"They were still living — kiawe is resilient," Damon said. "But they were by no means pleasant to look at."

Damon didn't want to remove the trees — a bad habit for a historic park, he said — but it came down to safety and aesthetics. Recycling the wood into furniture seemed the perfect solution.

The trees were cut down in May by Trees of Hawaii, whose president, Abner Undan, is an avid proponent of recycling what he trims. Since 1976, when he started as a groundsman, the company regularly gave wood carvers free trimmings, Undan said. The company will even deliver it, if possible.

'SENTIMENTAL VALUE'

The amount recycled to carvers is maybe 5 percent, Undan said. Otherwise, the wood may be used for wood chips, compost or barbecue fuel.

"It really pains us, especially me, to throw this away," Undan said. "They are worthless to a lot of people but there is a lot of history and value to these logs."

People tend to forget that it takes a lifetime to grow a large tree, Undan said.

"If I had a big tree that I had for generations, there would be some amount of sentimental value and I would like to keep a memento of that tree, and the best way is to turn some of that wood into something that would last for another generation or two," he said.

That's the hope for Swedberg's pieces. When completed, they will be coated with a clear finish that protects them from the sun's ultraviolet rays.

As Swedberg has worked, muscling a 35-pound chainsaw and its 52-inch bar or coating himself with ground kiawe as he shaped the logs, some of the walkers who regularly tour the park have stopped to thank him for his creations.

"I want to do stuff that is fun and gives people a sense of beauty," he said. "They should have fun and enjoy themselves when they see it. I want to uplift their spirits when they see it."

Old kiawe wood recycled at Moanalua Gardens to create benches, chairs, tables, sculptures