the wood of the ebony tree --8/13/25

13 Aug 2025

the wood of the ebony tree --8/13/25

0 COMMENTS

Today's selection--from Twelve Trees by Daniel Lewis. The highly coveted heartwood of the ebony tree:

“Musicians, cabinetmakers, chess players, and pool hustlers have lusted for centuries after the wood of the ebony tree, primarily exploited on the African continent. One botanist has described the wood as the tree world's equivalent of the blood diamonds of Africa. The hardwood has stunning characteristics: dense enough to sink in water, and breathtakingly gorgeous in its polished form. Buyers and sellers have used it as a form of global currency, dating back to ancient Egypt. Despite its long use, the wood also retains its mysteries, for scientists still aren't sure just what dictates the color of ebony, and we still have only a rudimentary grasp of its biology.

“Desire can cut different ways: it can move people to protect trees, but at the same time, it can bring waste and loss. People lose their minds trying to achieve their heart's desires. Acting on lust without contemplating consequences often triggers bad behavior: corruption, a lack of cooperation, and looking the other way when the right way isn't far around the corner. Ebony's intense appeal has made it a mighty commodity.

“One of the most desirable of these woods is Diospyros crassiflora, known as Central African forest ebony, but also called Gabon ebony, West African ebony, and a few other common names. The tree has a fluted base, tapering upward as it rises, reaching about seventy-five feet in height and a bit more than three feet in diameter. Native to the forests of the Congo basin, D. crassiflora is widespread across the region but has probably never been abundant. The most recent estimates suggest a surviving population of fewer than thirty million individual trees above ten centimeters in diameter. It lives among a vast cohort of other tree species, all hard at work: Congo basin forests across six countries sequester forty billion tons of carbon, more than any other part of the world and surpassing even the Amazon basin. Nature produces ebony very slowly: the trees take around sixty years to get to a harvestable size when they're planted in a sunny location, and many centuries to reach maturity when they're under the shade of deep forest canopy.

“The Congo basin is a magical place, but a foreboding one. Its forests are ancient, rich, and complex in their ecological workings, bristling with biodiversity, an imperial past, and various dangers. Joseph Conrad's novelistic descriptions of the region, based on his travel journals while serving as a boat captain up the Congo River in 1890, sketch out the region's ambiguities as well as the sheer awesomeness of the forest. ‘The sky was a benign immensity of unstained light,’ he wrote in Heart of Darkness, his critique of European colonial rule in Africa. ‘Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, and an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish ... It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.’

“Northwest of the river, hugging the South Atlantic Ocean and butted against Equatorial Guinea, lies Cameroon. The country's forest estate covers 21.6 million hectares, including wild, lush landscapes that have summoned explorers for centuries. Distributed across southern Cameroon and into Gabon, and farther east and more sparsely into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the nearly thirty million individuals of D. crassiflora might sound like an abundance, but it's not. To put this number in perspective: in 2019, in a burst of national civic and environmental duty, Ethiopia, on the eastern side of the continent, planted more than ten times that number of trees—more than 350 million seedlings, in a single day,closing schools and government offices so everyone could join in the planting work.

Cross-section of an unprocessed piece of ebony wood

“But putting a tree to work takes a lot more than just planting it in the ground. The current count of individual ebony trees is also deceptive, because the majority of the big, carbon-sequestering examples have been logged, and of the surviving trees, only 190,000 have a diameter at breast height (DBH, a standard tree measurement) of more than sixty centimeters. That diameter, about two feet across in English units, is the minimum size for legal tree harvesting across much of Africa. Coincidentally, this is also the diameter at which the ebony tree begins to have enough black wood to be commercially viable.

“The tree's heartwood is the source of the dark wood, living below its cloak of cambium and sapwood. Because of its hardness and finely pored structure, ebony can be polished to a beguiling sheen. The wood is embedded in the planet's cultural life. The French term for ‘cabinetmaker’ is ebeniste, but ebony has also been used for furniture inlays; sculptures; carvings; the handles of doors, umbrellas, and walking canes; lots and lots of pool cues (about a thousand cubic meters' worth in a single year around 1910); the tips and handles of weapons ancient and modern; doorknobs; piano keys; chess pieces; parts of bagpipes; organ-stops; and guitar fingerboards and bridges by the linear mile. D. crassiflora has unique acoustic properties, and musicians have desired it over the centuries for use in musical instruments. It shows up as the wood of choice for tuning pegs on orchestral stringed instruments in all of their flavors, small to big: violas, violins, cellos, and double basses.; Violins, which are only slightly less popular than guitars, have their own specific intersections with ebony. One story, seemingly impossible to confirm, claims that ebony became an especially desirable wood for violins in the eighteenth century when shaving became increasingly common and the use of dark ebony provided a form of camouflage—the oily, sweaty, bare chins of players made far less noticeable marks on the dark ebony butt ends of their violins. There is also the embarrassment of violin hickey. That's its common name; dermatologists call it ‘acne mechanica.’ Some people are allergic to ebony, along with other woods, and prolonged playing can leave a mark where the violin nestles; it's also sometimes called ‘fiddler's neck.’

“But regardless of its uses, musical or otherwise, not all ebony is alike. The seemingly simple term ‘ebony’ (along with other generic names such as rosewood or mahogany) causes confusion in the realms of regulation, legislation, trafficking, enforcement, the gathering of statistics, and other metrics that are vital to tracking the ways that wood is transported and used around the world. Proper identification tightly circumscribes how commercial and environmental groups use and respond to scarcity and abundance. One species of ebony might be legal for importation, but another with a very similar common name might be prohibited. The tree is part of a big, shaggy family—the Ebenaceae, a clade of flowering plants, containing nearly eight hundred species of trees and shrubs. Witness the persimmon, the best-known tree in the group. All persimmons are in the same genus as D. crassiflora. In 20I8, the planet produced more than 4.7 million tons of persimmon fruits, most of them for eating, and the majority of those being from Diospyros kaki. Persimmon wood is used for woodworking, and musical instruments too, like other species of true ebony. The American persimmon is also called American ebony, as its heartwood ranges from brown to black, or has variegated color, as does D. crassiflora.”