When molecular biophysics and biochemistry professor Scott Strobel left the lab for an administrative position on West Campus, he wanted a hobby. Strobel filled his garage with power tools for woodcutting. But the inspiration for his new project came to him in the form of a beech tree that a groundskeeper was cutting down in front of the Yale Admissions Office on Hillhouse Avenue. He had bought the tools; here was the wood he would cut.

Strobel retrieved the downed beech from Hillhouse in 2007, but it was two years later that he carved it into his first Yale bowl. By the summer of 2010, Strobel’s house was overflowing with these bowls, each a different shape and texture, but all of them vivid evocations of the trees they came from. But Strobel didn’t have the room for them in his home anymore. That summer, he launched the Yale Bowls website.

Strobel was excited when he sold his first bowl to the mother of a Yale student. But since then, these bowls crafted from the trees of Yale’s campus have not just been for the longing graduates and nostalgic alums. They’ve also been presented to renowned guests to campus such as the president of Israel.

The interface on the Yale Bowls site lets you pick a tree and then see the products that were made from it. There are still pens left from the original admissions beech, bowls from a Phelps Gate elm, and two pens made from the bleachers at the real Yale Bowl. Each product comes with a story of its source tree’s history.

Strobel isn’t just a fan of Yale’s fallen green giants. “I like to get wood from all kinds of interesting, weird places,” Strobel told me. One year he acquired wood from both the Brooklyn Bridge boardwalk and from Lake Gatun on the Panama Canal. From that he made two pens, which the University presented to historian David McCullough, DC ’55, whose early works chronicle the histories of both the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal.

Strobel’s hobby has grown to include his family. “My son is in college in Utah, so he makes the pens from the smaller pieces of wood,” Strobel said. He actually mails pieces of Yale’s trees to his son, who sends back completed wooden pens. The revenue has been enough to allow him to pay for his own tuition.

Strobel’s brother also helps with the process, mostly by gathering wood. I suspected that woodworking ran in the family. Strobel admitted that his grandfather enjoyed it, but he added, “Maybe it runs in the family, but he didn’t teach any of us how to do it.” Strobel’s brother was self-taught in the woodworking skill, and Strobel took courses to learn. “I think there’s some sort of love in the tactile,” he says.

Nowadays we don’t know the true origins of almost anything we buy. Maybe the “love of the tactile” isn’t just in the process of carving out a bowl—it’s in creating an object with a sense of place.