MINNEAPOLIS — If a tree has an afterlife, Cindy Siewert can find it.

She owns Wood From the Hood, a business that recycles trees into furniture, walls and flooring. It’s a way for the owners of a beloved tree to make it part of their lives — recycling memories and wood at the same time.

She won’t touch a tree that’s been unnecessarily sawed down. “We only take fallen trees from disease, construction or storm damage,” Siewert said in her Wood From the Hood showroom in the Seward neighborhood of South Minneapolis.

The business began after she and her husband, Rick Siewert, were faced with an ash tree growing into the foundation of their home. At the same time, they needed new kitchen flooring.

Instead of importing wood from, say, China or Brazil, thought Siewert, why not use the wood that was only a few feet away?

The idea kept coming up. In a later conversation, the owner of a tree service confessed he felt guilty about trucking local trees away like garbage.

“He said, ‘We really have to do something. We are just hauling these to the dump,’” recalled Rick.

Cindy started Wood From the Hood in 2008, sharing a site with her husband’s cabinet-making business.

But she faced an immediate problem.

When people live close to trees, they can’t seem to resist pounding in nails — for ladder steps, hammock holders, light hangers.

Siewert’s collection of metal found in trees includes an arrowhead, screws and a 14-inch lag bolt.

In sawmills, even a small nail can ruin a standard $1,000 circular blade. That’s why most lumber comes from trees grown in vast corporate forests and urban trees end up in landfills.

But Siewert found a solution. Her workers saw the logs in a portable sawmill with a lightweight band-saw blade. If it hits a nail, the new blade is a snap to replace — for only $30.

The sawmill-on-a-trailer can handle an 8-foot log 2 feet in diameter, sawing it into planks.

Siewert’s first big job was the visitors center at the new Silverwood Park in St. Anthony. The park had removed 80 oak trees, and Wood From the Hood recycled them into counters and furniture.

Acting as a mortician for dead trees, Siewert quickly learned that she benefited from tree diseases.

The recent outbreak of emerald ash borer has meant more ash for her to work with, just as Dutch elm disease triggers a glut of elm.

When insects recently forced the destruction of 200 trees at the Fort Snelling Golf Club, Siewert took 33 of the biggest ones and turned them into various products. She has found a market in builders seeking LEED certification, a kind of seal of approval for “green” construction methods.

As Siewert started a recent tour of her shop, she stepped into a vast clattering factory where ear-plugged workers scurried among the machines.

A router whined loudly as workers pushed elm pieces into it, to make seats for a swing-set company. Stacks of red cedar from Chaska were waiting to be transformed into cribbage boards.

Piles of wood were color-coded, to reveal their origins.

Rick Siewert pointed out some turquoise-tipped planks, from ash trees removed when a memorial was installed at the state Capitol. Yellow-tagged logs were from a local church.

Most of Wood From the Hood’s customers feel a connection to their trees.

When the people at Macalester College in St. Paul wanted to remember a silver maple that had died, Cindy Siewert turned it into a decorative wall in a conference room. When an ash tree fell on the St. Paul campus of Hamline University, it was reborn as a display to honor donors.

Siewert gets calls from homeowners who want to preserve memories.

A Minneapolis attorney was saddened when a favorite oak fell in his yard, so he had it made into a conference table for his office. One woman wanted to sleep with her fallen black walnut tree — so she had Siewert turn it into a bed headboard.

“It’s up to their imagination,” said Siewert.