The great timber trees
The precious woods that built ships, furniture and instruments — and the slow, scattered trees that demand has pushed to the edge.
- 01
Trees№ 4874 minTeak: The Weatherproof Timber That Built the World's Ships
The premier tropical hardwood — self-oiling, rot-proof, dimensionally stable — that panelled navies and decked yachts, and the plantation crop that now supplies it.
- 02
Trees№ 2784 minMahogany: The Furniture Wood a Single Moth Keeps Wild
The rich red timber that defined fine furniture — logged toward scarcity, listed on CITES, and impossible to grow in plantations because a small caterpillar destroys every seedling.
- 03
Trees№ 1454 minEbony and Blackwood: The Black Timbers That Make Music
The jet-black heartwoods prized for piano keys and clarinets — so dense they sink, so slow-grown and over-cut that the trees behind the world's woodwind are now running out.
- 04
Trees№ 3984 minRosewood and Sandalwood: The Most Trafficked Trees in the World
The fragrant, rich-grained timbers behind fine guitars and sacred incense — rosewood now the single most illegally traded wild product on Earth, and sandalwood a tree that feeds off its neighbours' roots.
- 05
Trees№ 2674 minLignum Vitae: The Wood That Oils Itself and Sinks Like Stone
The hardest, densest commercial timber on Earth — self-lubricating with its own resin, it ran the propeller-shaft bearings of ships and submarines, and was once sold as a cure for everything.
- 06
Trees№ 2314 minIpê and Pau d'Arco: The Trumpet Trees of Flower and Iron
Latin American trees that blaze leafless yellow and pink across whole cities in the dry season — and whose wood is so hard and rot-proof it sinks and outlasts concrete, driving a decking trade that is stripping the forest.
- 07
Trees№ 1983 minGreenheart and Purpleheart: The Timbers of Sea and Colour
Two extraordinary South American woods — greenheart, so tough and borer-proof it built the docks and lock gates of the age of empire, and purpleheart, which turns a brilliant royal purple on exposure to air.
- 08
Trees№ 2324 minIroko: The African Teak and the Tree of Spirits
A durable golden-brown West African timber sold as 'African teak' — a fig-family giant revered as a dwelling of spirits, guarded by taboo, and armoured against the sawmill by stones inside its own wood.
- 09
Trees№ 3373 minPadauk: The Blood-Red Wood of Drums and Bleeding Bark
A nitrogen-fixing legume whose freshly-cut heartwood is a vivid blood-orange-red, prized for instruments and fine woodwork — and whose wounded bark weeps a red 'kino' gum like dragon's blood.
- 10
Trees№ 1304 minDipterocarps: The Two-Winged Giants That Rule the Rainforest
The towering trees that dominate the forests of Southeast Asia, flower en masse only once every few years at a drought's signal, spin their seeds down on paired wings — and supply most of the world's tropical plywood.
- 11
Trees№ 4283 minShisham: North India's Rosewood of Field and Furniture
A fast, tough, nitrogen-fixing rosewood that lines the canals and roads of northern India — its hard, handsome, durable timber the workhorse of the region's furniture, second in prestige only to teak.