I'm Asked So Often On Pieces Of Treen To Identify The Different Woods, So I Decided To Try And H

The other day I bought a box of specimen wood samples which would have been taken around the large country estates for people to choose what wood they wanted their furniture, tea caddy, pieces of treen etc. made from. So I thought I would write a blog with some images of the most common different woods in their raw state.

It's one of the most difficult parts of my job sometimes trying to identify a wood, because depending on how and where its been used can alter the appearance of the wood significantly.eg A candle box hung on the wall by a kitchen fire made from sycamore will probably have a build up of black on its surface, compared with maybe a dairy bowl from the same wood used on a daily basis for butter or cream where the wood would be a lot lighter and have a different patina.

Woods in their raw state before polishing with wax, oils etc look different to how they finish up but have a look at the images on this blog which do show the grain of the wood in the raw state and then spend time looking at a piece which has 200 years of polish, dirt, light, water etc and you should start to be able to pick up signs of what wood it is. Photo 1 Sycamore Photo 2 Beech Photo 3 Ash Photo 4 Walnut Photo 5 Oak If you would like more images of different woods please leave comments.

The beauty of 200-300 year old Antique treen pieces is the patina and colour which comes from an object having been used and waxed and handled for all those years, pieces that have been stripped back, cleaned or repolished are never the same.