Ancient Wood

Warning: This is one of those stories about "things that Bill gets excited about but that others might not find so interesting."

Some time ago, I read the book A Splintered History of Wood: Belt Sander Races, Blind Woodworkers, and Baseball Bats. In about its first chapter, the book discusses sources and types of wood and introduced me to a wood called kauri. Kauri still grows in New Zealand and is protected by the government, but there are ancient kauri trees (30,000 to 50,000 years old, according to carbon dating) that can be extracted from peat bogs in New Zealand, dried, and cut into lumber. The extracted trees are enormous (some as big as redwoods). Here is a little video about such an extraction:

The wood is rare, of course, but because live trees are not cut down to make it available, it is not considered a threatened species, as many other woods are. Still, I understand some New Zealanders object to its export.

What makes the wood so interesting is that when finished, it has an almost luminescent property. When viewed from different angles, it shimmers and shows dark changing to golden and back again. A Splintered History of Wood informed me that the sole source of kauri in the United States is a company called Ancient Wood LTD in Ashland, WI. If you click here, you can learn more about the company and read about kauri, see examples of things made from the wood, see a little video that attempts to show the grain and luminescent nature of the grain, and even purchase wood, if you want (it is expensive!). Ashland is north of us, in a pretty area right along the south shore of Lake Superior (very near the Apostle Islands).

So, on Thursday, Kathie and I traveled about 70 miles to Ashland to visit the company. I wanted to see the wood, see some of the projects they do with the wood, and maybe buy a board for some special projects.

Some of these pictures are a little blurry, because we weren't careful enough about letting the camera focus--sorry about that. Nevertheless, I thought you might find them interesting. To start, here I am standing alongside a 40 foot long board of kauri. The wood really doesn't give off its luminescent look until it is finished.

The company does special order projects with the wood. Many of them involve use of interesting pieces of burl from the lower area of the trunks. They often finish such pieces by covering them with transparent epoxy. This picture begins to show off some of the beauty of the grain.

This piece was in process. They had filled holes in the piece with a collection of interesting stones from Lake Superior and covered them with epoxy. In a next step, the entire piece would be covered with epoxy. Such pieces are then mounted on some type of pedestal to make a coffee or end table.

This one is going to an office somewhere in Chicago.

They call this one the Wisconsin piece.

This table has kauri in the center and seven or eight other woods around the edges. The pedestals in the background show the kauri grain quite well.

I ended up buying a few pen blanks and one board, about 10" wide and six feet long. There may be a Christmas present or two or three or four hiding in that board. Not everyone has something made from a board that may have come from a 50,000 year old tree!