Quite a while ago an associate of mine sent me this picture. He got the tree of the municipality where he lives and he’s drying it now. As you can see the heart is brownish.
… suddenly I wonder, could it be just brown rot? … or maybe its ‘wetwood’ (slime flux)?
In that case the timber is just utter crap isn’t it?
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The heartwood of birch is "red birch" and sold as almost a different wood in commercial channels--pretty much the same way that the cream colored maple is the sapwood with a more colorful heartwood. Red birch is an excellent cherry substitute, being of similar color, with perhaps a bit more figure but not darkening to anything like the same extent.
Every wood has a sap wood and a heart wood. The sap wood is living tissue - conducts the fluids from the roots through the stem (trunk) of the tree through the branches to the leaves where it is transformed by photosynthesis to food for the entire plant. The manufactured food is then transported by the bark back down to the roots for growth and nourishment. The inner wood, or heart wood, is dead wood - not rotten wood. It doesn't grow, doesn't tranport fluids. It does provide rigidity and strength to the tree. As the tree grows and matures the inside layer of sapwood continues to die and become heartwood.
The birch tree has a very pronounced difference in color between the heartwood and the sap wood. Nothing wrong with the wood. Just the nature of the beast. If you want to make your cabinet or whatever out of just the lighter color wood, just pick those parts of the tree. Save the heartwood for some other work.
Sorry for the long treatise. If it doesn't fit for you, maybe someone else will gain some interest from it.
Paul
I know about the distinction between heart- and sapwood.
This difference is just definately more than just than that, that's why I asked.Edit: It might be that it is River birch (= red birch) indeed. This species is very rare in Europe, so I didn't think of it before.
Thx!
Edited 11/19/2005 2:19 pm ET by Baumstrunk
Oops, I didn't mean to be so elemental. Sometimes I forget that I'm talking to adults. And for it being River Birch or whatever, you're way over my head. I don't think we have any native birch here in this area of West Virginia at all. At least I haven't seen any.
Up here in central BC Canada all our birch is paper birch (Betula Papyrifera). There are many mature trees I have logged, milled and then made furniture or carved that do not have the brown heart (called stain around here) so it is not heart wood. That said, I never find rot without it and the general concensus of wood workers here is it's the very beginnings of rot but is not rot itself. I have used the wood many times in projects and it works and finishes the same as the unstained birch.
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