How Burr Forest Got its Name
Low German, an obnoxious weed, and a farm more than 100 years old
Burr Forest is a loose translation of the Lower German word Burlwalde.
My family’s farm was settled in the late 1800s. It is nestled along the edge of what I grew up calling the Burwalde Woods. This, I would later learn, is a redundancy. A scholar and family friend casually mentioned to me one day – as if it was common knowledge – that Burwalde is Low German for Burr Woods. Of course it is, I thought. So, naively, I had been calling my childhood playground the Burr Woods Woods.
After getting over the horror and shame of realizing I had been committing this heinous communications blunder for most of my life, this new Anglicized way of talking about a characteristic of the farm (the forest) my wife, Jamie, and I value immensely felt fresh, novel, inspiring.
The first legal entity to bear the name was our farm corporation – Burr Forest Acres. This was the name’s trial run. It debuted to little fanfare. The Corporations office did not send me a personal letter praising me for my creative and thoughtful farm name. Local farmers did not seem to care, either. I am sure I wrote about it in Grainews and maybe the Financial Post, too – nothing but crickets.
I liked the name. Who needs praise anyway?! I’m not a needy guy. This, you should know, is a lie. I count and recount social media likes with the best of them.
Perhaps farmers were confused about what I would name my farm after a weed. You don’t know this, but the Burwalde Woods is full of burdock, a tenacious, annoying weed that produces beautiful purple flowers and, most notably, it creates a seemingly endless supply of sticky burrs that will lodge themselves in your hair, on your pants, your shirt, your socks, your shoelaces, your home, and your washing machine.
Knowing all of this, I forged ahead with the name, believing the strong narrative surrounding its origins would overshadow the agronomic judgments.
I thought its name came from the weed and I made peace with that, but I was recently told that it comes from Ukraine, where, apparently, there was once a mennonite settlement called Burwalde. This is my own conjecture, but I am guessing mennonite immigrants from that area settled in the region we now farm and brought the name with them.
In my happiest dreams, the name refers to a forest full of burr oak trees, but I can neither confirm nor deny that this is accurate. There are some mighty oaks in the Burr Forest, mind you.
I knew that starting a company focused on agricultural communications under my name would have some import. It was 2022. Burr Forest Group was about to get rolling. I was coming off a few years of intense productivity on the writing side. I had a column in Grainews, the Western Producer, and I had just wrapped up a long stint as an ag writer at the Financial Post. I was speaking about clear, effective communications at events. Naming the company after me could have worked.
However, I wanted to start a company that could outgrow me. I wanted to build something I could eventually leave, observe, and be proud of. The name Burr Forest Group had a resonance I was unable to ignore. Many agencies, consultancies, and firms have ‘Group’ as their suffix. There would have been an argument for selecting a different noun. I chose ‘Group’ because that’s what we are and that’s what I hope we continue to be. I’m grateful to work with a good group of people and good group of clients.
Burr Forest is just a name. Some of you have asked where it comes from. This is that story.
