|
|
Furniture - A knee-jerk reaction to fears about the
long–term health of the environment might be to assume that
we should use as little wood in our homes and furniture
as possible, laying vinyl floors instead of boards, or choosing metal
or plastic for our furnishings. Indeed, some valuable hardwoods, such
as rosewood from the dalbergia tree, hugely fashionable for fine furniture
throughout much of nineteenth century and imported to Europe from
south America and the West Indies, are unobtainable today, having
been exhausted by ferocious demand. Perhaps a contemporary equivalent
might be African wenge wood, currently the height of furniture fashion,
dark and heavy with a straight grain and coarse texture.
However, unlike the dalbergia, wenge is being replanted.
Fortunately for those who love wooden furniture as
much as they love trees, the drive for sustainable timber, harvested
from properly managed forests, has led to new standards, making it
possible to ensure that the new wood we purchase today is genuinely
‘environmentally friendly’. There is now a globally recognized
environmental standard for timber, which has been put forward by the
international Forest Stewardship Council. Any wood bearing the FSC
logo can be bought with a clear conscience.
Buying hardwoods for furniture, such as oak, sycamore,
ash, beech, elm and cherry, from countries that have signed up to
these new international standards stimulates a market for the more
valuable and expensive timbers, giving woodland owners a financial
incentive to husband their stock of trees. The majority of the world’s
farmed trees are still used to provide cheap fuel and paper. These
softwood plantation trees can sell for as little as a few pounds each.
 Hardwoods,
used for more high –value products are comparatively expensive.
A single hardwood log from an old tree with a desirable colour and
grain may fetch several thousands of pounds.
The distinction between hardwoods and softwoods is a commercial one
and is not wholly accurate as a purely descriptive term. Trees that
produce softwoods are conifers, evergreens with tough needle-like
leaves. These are the most ancient species of tree, including giant
redwood trees, which were found in the Jurassic period, 195 million
years ago. Spruces, pines and fir trees are the most commonly cultivated
sources of softwoods, generally growing faster than their deciduous
cousins, giving a loosely grained, relatively light wood that is easy
to cut , shape and stain. However, a 150-year-old Douglas fir will
yield a much harder, rot-resistant wood than a young yellow pine,
while yew trees, which can live for more than a thousand years, provide
a wood so strong it was the fabric for the lethal English longbow.
Hardwoods are the timber of broad-leaved trees and range from the
extremely hard, such as ebony, to a wood such as beech, which will
quickly deteriorate when exposed to the weather. |
|
