Wood Characteristics

It’s obvious wood is a tree product. While products like paper bear no resemblance to what it once was, wood directly correlates to the life of a tree. Within the lines that wood exhibits, the processes of a tree’s life can be observed. We all know that we can count the rings to tell the tree’s age, but do you count the lines or spaces? What isn’t as commonly known is that the gaps are what grows in the springtime (or rain season for tropical species); more growth can happen during this period because there is more rain to promote growth. While rarely a factor, the early wood, as it’s known, is less dense because the focus is on growth. In the summer there is less water to promote growth, so the late wood is less but more dense. An interesting way to (roughly) tell what kind of weather past years have gotten would be seeing which rings are wider or narrower than the median size of them.

With this in mind, we can think of wood as an autopsy of the tree. So let’s figure out what these lines mean.