So beautiful! I have lots of trees on my property. Wonder what it takes to get a piece of freshly cut wood ready to be made into something like this. Does the tree have to be live or dead when it is cut, or does it matter?
From a little experience with recently fallen big oak trees. I cut up into big slabs about 2-3 inches thick just so I could handle them, 12 pieces 2 foot long swatted my F-250 super duty while they were still intact just off the ground. I sized them down with a big chainsaw, squared some of it up with my table saw, then ran a few pieces through my planner. The grain was really cool, but really still wet inside. Me being sometimes impatient, while they were dead flat did a beautiful little V carve scripture on a piece. My wife painted in the letters by hand, she does a great job on it. The grain was so cool in it, and it was very cold here then. After finishing it I brought it inside our home where it is warm. The very next day it bowed like a rainbow when it started drying out. That was not my intentions. It was straight, it was flat, and it rolled like I bent it around a 50-gallon drum.
I took it back and gave it the people that gave me the wood that swatted my truck down. They really liked it bowed like that too. Like I did it on purpose

, they have the only bowed piece like that in the world. The rest of it is awaiting drying out. Wood does really weird things when it is still full of moisture, and/ or sap. I could have filled up the back of my truck with the sawdust I chopped all that wood up in my driveway over knee deep, with biggest chainsaw, the wife, likes to be my boss was thrilled with the mess made.

I get my maple from Woodcraft. I for the most part still needs a little love to get it squared up and planed slightly. You can get exotic wood from them cheaper than you can get pine at Homedepot or Lowes, but you got to get the longer, bigger pieces that no one else wants to mess with to get them right to do my carving, which is scripture 99%.
Hope this helps save your back, lots of works and time in green wood.
Ray