Will eastern/Pensylvania Cherry match up well with western/Oregon Cherry?? Are these the same species of wood ?? I ask because I live in Northern Idaho, and can easily get Oregon Cherry in 4/4 and 8/4, but thicker stock is difficult to come by and hard to work into manageable sizes. I saw an add from Adams table legs for turning squares which are nearly 12/4, and dimensioned in lengths near to what I need, so little wasted wood, and no difficult rips of massive boards on my 1and 1/2HP contractor’s saw to arrive at what is allready available for a reasonable price.
I have tried to match the eastern walnut with our western walnut and was disappointed by the rather dramatic differences, but walnut seems to vary alot from board to board unless from the same tree, and there seems to be multiple species, are easter and western different species ??
Thoughts and help appreciated, I have never regretted having extra wood around, but I’d like to get a good bit of matching wood for cherry Morris chairs I am going to build, and since the legs are the thickest pieces, thought I would start there, and match the rest to them.
Thanks,
DAVE
Replies
No, Dave, our eastern black cherry (Prunus serotina) is not native to the northwestern states. The northwestern most extent of its range fades out in central Minnesota and extreme western Iowa...although it does extend slightly further west in the Southern states (into central Texas.)
You do have three native cherry species in your area: pin cherry, Chokecherry and bitter cherry...with chokecherry having the most expansive contiguous range of any species in the Prunus genus. Because birds eat the fruit and scatter the seeds across great distances , most of the cherries tend to pop up in pockets all over the place...For example, even black cherry is found on a very limited basis in the highlands of Central America as a result of bird migration routes.
The species common to your area, however, tend to be smaller trees than our eastern black cherry and their woods are not as dark in color. Like virtually all of the so called "fruitwoods" in the Rose family, even these commercially unimportant species are nice cabinetwoods; mostly very fine textured, with excellent shaping and turning properties...but it's difficult sourcing stock in widths and lengths that would make them a practical choice for making major pieces of furniture.
...Also, commingling these other species in a piece with black cherry is probably a bad idea. Cherry has a very slow and complex patina forming process and even if you were able to initially blend the two (with some clever touch up staining), as the different species went about developing their unique long term patinas the mismatch would eventually become obvious. In fact, even when working with a single species of cherry, you have to be very careful in selecting stock that has consistent color at the time all the boards are freshly planed.
Cherry is a fabulous wood, but you've really got to know what you're doing to get optimum results with it.
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As for walnut, you westerners have access to a number of species of walnut. The only one native to the Northwestern region is Hinds walnut (Juglans hindsii), but because our eastern black wanut (Juglands nigra) is often used as a rootstock species for grafting with the commercial Old World species (Juglans regia, AKA English walnut), you have access to the woods of all three...PlUS some of the Asiatic walnuts (for example, heartnut and Manchurian walnut) have been used in developing hybrids...So, you have even a broader range of subtly different walnut woods to work with.
...This drifts into trivia, but the walnuts represent a very ancient botanical family that was, geographically speaking, badly busted up during the Ice Age. What you now have out there, thanks to the manipulation of nut growers, is the most complete unification of the walnut gene pool to appear anywhere in the world in at least several million years.
Edited 10/8/2003 3:02:36 AM ET by Jon Arno
Jon
I got some chokecherry by accident, and it was beautiful, and I used a couple of baords in a piece made otherwise from a flitch of Pennsylvania black cherry. Does this mean I willhave problems with color downstream?
Alan
That's a mighty likely prospect, s4s...unless the Pennsylvania cherry was boarderline, immature heartwood with incomplete loading of the wood's normal extractives. I haven't seen any formal research on this topic, but in my personal experience, I suspect the long term patina process in cherry is closely tied to the quantity of extractives the tree was able to imbed in its heartwood tissue before harvest. This is true of all species, but it seems to be especially so with cherry...probably because of the photosensitivity of its extractives. Even slight differences (contrasts) in color that are hardly noticeable when the wood is freshly planed seem to intensify.
Whenever possible, I try to use cherry stock that I can confirm came from the same tree for use in any given project. I'll even go so far as to check the curvature of the annual rings on each board in an attempt to select stock that was at least adjacent within the log. I often do this with other species, simply because it usually yields similar figure on the flat sawn surface...but with cherry, the additional motive is to be using stock that most likely has closely comparable levels of extractives that are comparably aged. This may be nothing but a pure ritual on my part...but I do it just the same.
Be careful with something called Western Red Cherry. This is often times another name for Alder, and they'll try to get a premium price for it.
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