Its linden not basswood.

[DiLeon]

Wood-spoked wheels were completely phased out when Ford introduced the "new Ford" - the 1928 to 1931 cars were all manufactured with steel-spoked wheels.
I accept the blame for this off topic excursion. LOL

I have no problems with off-topic subject matter...LOL, it is very interesting all of it. Thanks for your input.

[4ND3R5]

I'm curious Brian, why do you have three hundred slides of different wood species? Just because you are interested in it? For work?

[DiLeon]

I'm curious Brian, why do you have three hundred slides of different wood species? Just because you are interested in it? For work?

Brian's background is in biology. He knows a lot about biochemistry. And if my memory serves me Phil background is an engineer. Sorry, Phil if I got that wrong. So you can see the difference in thought clearly by the conversation. My background is in art..the chaos of creation which means taking everything you can and making something of it. I question everything and anything. We have major differences in the background
which means different thoughts at different levels...which makes this forum really a format to learn new things.

[Brian T]

My Master's degree concerned the anatomy of grafting in fruit trees. That meant making a great many microscope slides. It was just as easy to slip in whatever else I could find. Stuff like lilacs, maples, oaks, ashes, birches, willows and so on. Biology Department faculty were aware of what I was doing so there was a great swap of species slides!

As you know. Cannabis, in modest quantities and growth, is now legal in Canada. Not so much back in the hippie 60's. So I made lots of Cannabis slides to show off the distinctive leaf hairs.

[DiLeon]

My Master's degree concerned the anatomy of grafting in fruit trees. That meant making a great many microscope slides. It was just as easy to slip in whatever else I could find. Stuff like lilacs, maples, oaks, ashes, birches, willows and so on. Biology Department faculty were aware of what I was doing so there was a great swap of species slides!

As you know. Cannabis, in modest quantities and growth, is now legal in Canada. Not so much back in the hippie 60's. So I made lots of Cannabis slides to show off the distinctive leaf hairs.

What a good excuse for getting legally high....LOL

[Brian T]

I'll stick to wood anatomy, thanks.
That has brought me to many different tables to participate in wood oriented tasks.

I was in England, N. Yorks, about 10 years ago. With more time, I might have been able to fiddle with the lime/basswood thing. I don't know basswood.

[Rick Wiebe]

Well just to add to the mix:
I planted a European Little Leafed Linden in our yard in West Kelowna about 20 some years ago. It grew like crazy (lots of irrigation), and I thought that one day I would have some carving wood from it.
We sold the house and moved on but just a couple of years ago now, a friend who lived across the street from our former house called to tell me that the current owner had cut the tree down.
It is about an hour away from our current location, and I hurried over and got a few pieces that I turned into blocks and sealed the ends so that they could dry without checking.
I have used some of the wood for some projects and it is pretty good to carve, though not as good as the really primo stuff I got from John Kranz.
Lately I have been using some Trembling Aspen wood that some beavers have thoughtfully felled for me near a favorite fishing hole of mine on the Ashnola River. The trees are nice big ones and I can drive my pickup right to them and block them up with the chain saw.
The Aspen is better than some Basswood that I have used, but again not as good as the prime northern Basswood, which sadly, does not grow wild in BC.

[buckbeans]

Well just to add to the mix:

Lately I have been using some Trembling Aspen wood that some beavers have thoughtfully felled for me near a favorite fishing hole of mine on the Ashnola River. The trees are nice big ones and I can drive my pickup right to them and block them up with the chain saw.
The Aspen is better than some Basswood that I have used, but again not as good as the prime northern Basswood, which sadly, does not grow wild in BC.

I am shifting to more and more aspen because of availability. Please be aware that Grinling Gibbons the famous wood sculptor from England favored Aspen also.
Hampton Court which housed many of Gibbons work had a large fire recently which unfortunately barbecued a lot of his work. David Esterly an American who oversaw the reconstruction and repair of the carving wrote about this big project. The building caretakers who took over its care a hundred years ago , planted numerous English Linden groves with the foresight to use these to repair the carvings in the future. Twenty years ago,
when the fire occurred they started cutting the trees down to be used for the repair.
After they were seasoned, they were given to the most talented English carvers. After trying them out, They thought the wood grown right next to the court was of poor quality and refused to go any further. They ended up using Limewood from Belgium and the Netherlands which even now is acknowledged by the Europeans as being the best in the world.

[Rick Wiebe]

I did not know that Gibbons preferred Aspen. Thanks for that tidbit.

The man that sold me the Linden sapling that I planted grew up in the Netherlands. He told me that when he was young he used to pick the blossoms off the linden trees, dry them and sell them for making tea.

I know the bees loved that tree that grew in our yard. In the summer it seemed that the tree would hum! There we always hundreds of bees at work on it.

[Arthur C.]

Apparently not everyone would agree that Gibbons preferred aspen. This is a quote from a museum article:

"A famous example of this uncanny talent is the cravat (c.1690) once owned by Sir Horace Walpole. Exquisitely carved to imitate Venetian needlepoint lace in Gibbons’ favoured limewood..."

[DiLeon]

Depending on where your basswood comes from does matter. As people stated American Basswood is the one you want to use for carving. Clearly, after doing research the word basswood is meaningless when throwing all so-called basswood of trees into one basket. The moral of the story know where you are buying from. All these different basswood trees have different usages.

Four species of basswood are native to North America. The most widely distributed species is the American basswood (Tilia americana), a tree of temperate, hardwood forests of the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada. This is a relatively tall-growing species, which can reach a height of up to 82 ft (25 m). The leaves of this species are largest in relatively shaded parts of the crown, where they can achieve a length of more than 7.8 in (20 cm) and a width of 3.9 in (10 cm).

The white basswood (T. heterophylla) that occurs in the eastern United States is a medium-sized tree of the upper Piedmont region and the Appalachian Mountains where it grows on moist, welldrained soils in coves or along mountain streams with other hardwoods. Its growth is moderately fast and it produces commercially valuable lumber. The soft, lightweight wood is used for cabinetry, woodenware, and pulpwood, among its many uses.
The range of white basswood extends from southwestern Pennsylvania west in southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois to Missouri; south to northern Arkansas; east to northeastern Mississippi, Alabama, northwestern Florida, and Georgia; and north to Maryland. Outlying populations occur in eastern Pennsylvania and western New York. It reaches its largest growth in the Appalachian Mountains, where it is often dominant.

Tilia caroliniana Another favorite of pollinators, is the Carolina basswood A gray-barked variety of this linden tree is native to Texas and has been grown and harvested for use in interior woodwork native to the southern and south-eastern states of the U.S., and Mexico


Florida basswood (T. floridana) is the southeastern coastal plain of the United States.It is found at low altitudes, is the southernmost basswood variety. It is uncommon and usually of small size. The wood is of limited value.

[Brian T]

Let us not forget a carving wood from medieval times, the 'boxwood.' This is a genus of some 70(?) species, biggest and best is Buxus sempervirens. As paper-making became big business, the invention of the printing press came along. European boxwood was used to hold fine detail for words and letters and pictures as the carved wooden "type" used in the printing press.

Anybody claiming that a very old carving is done in boxwood, I'd be inclined to believe it. Over harvest, supply and demand, has made boxwood almost unobtainable.

The nearest thing I can compare it with in the Wood Data Base might be our paper birch, Betula papyrifera.

[arfabuck]

Wow! I just LOVE this off topic forum. SOOOO much information! Some misinformation too, but accept it for what it is. Grinlon Gibbons ( my particular interest ) preferring Aspen? Where did that come from? Of the 100 + items of his that I have researched ( handled in the past ) every one was English Lime. Never saw one of Aspen, and yes I can tell the difference between the two. Chalk and cheese. I am open to the possibility, ( and somebody is sure to point one out ) that he DID use Aspen, - but a preference?

Back to the topic of quality of timber used. I have found differences in timber quality of the same specie grown 100 yards apart. The defining growth characteristic ( same climate, time frame, ecosystem etc ) was the soil. One was more mineralised than the other is all. Higher sulphur content and the C/N ration was double.

Here in NZ we have a unique situation whereby Kauri trees (Agathis australis ) have, in the past, been decimated, preserved in swamps and are now being dug up and utilised for a multitude of purposes. ( the suggestion that they all got blown over by some catastrophic event at one time does not compute) I have carved 40, 10 and 4000 year old kauri, carbon dated. They all got blown over at one time? The NZ database is very accurate and is being updated continuously. The oldest is 63k right down to today. There is a mysterious gap of 15k years in chronological examples when no samples have been found. Mmmmm.

So carving the same specie can be exasperating if the timber came from a different stand, climate or country, or in my case - swamp. The older logs generally come out black, ( I pass it off as ebony and only a microscope can tell the difference ). and yes, again, I can tell the difference visually. I have ebony growing on the farm on Guadalcanal, - also Lignum Vitae but that is another subject. I now source Kauri from particular swamps to get the colour of 4k logs which I prefer. Also the older stuff is more mineralised and tends to shatter easily if hit with a chisel. BTW the oldest Kauri still growing in NZ is 2k old.

Marvellous world we live in, if only we spent more time to discover it eh?

[Claude]

"Wow! I just LOVE this off topic forum. SOOOO much information! "
Well, in my opinion this is not an off-topic discussion - it's about wood and in the Carving Wood and Materials Forum. And, I agree that there is a lot good information in this discussion.

[Brian T]

It's important to cast off _all_ common names as they change even from one district to another.
Basswood in North America is several species of Tilia. Linden, in the UK and Europe, is a similar collection but different species of Tilia.

My references to "boxwood" seem to have evaporated. I do recall that it isn't even in the genus Tilia.
The major value lay in the lack of obvious growth rings. Done exclusively in end grain carvings, boxwood was the foundation of the text of the printing press. And here I sit, typing with electrons, in the font of my choice.