Thread: Tasmanian Oak

Tas Oak = Vic Ash = Messmate (sometimes) = Eucalyptus Genericus lol. What's the difference between Victorian Ash and Tasmanian Oak? A veneerist's perspective | Matilda Veneer

Originally Posted by stevenjd

Hi guys, I have wondered how the term Tasmanian Oak started? ... .

I would not go there, Steven. Australian timber names were devised by (homesick?) early settlers but are so variable and so irrational .....

• Tas oak is nothing like European oaks,
• Mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans) is nothing like European ash,
• Alpine ash (Eucalyptus delegatensis) is nothing like European ash,
• But both "ashes" are components of the Tas oak cocktail,
• Blackwood used to be known as lightwood,
• Then there are the multivarious mahoganies, maples, beeches, ashes, oaks, rosewoods and walnuts.

About the only constant is that any resemblance to their namesake timber is "fleeting". And species names vary between regions.

I'd love to have seen the look on the face of the Pommy furniture maker who was sent a load of alocasuarina from his mate on the first fleet. "Here Fred, I picked this up at a place we call Lane Cove, it looks a bit like oak so we call it she oak, why don't you see what you can make from it." Fred knocks up a chair from it, blunting all his planes & chisels in the process, and sends the chair back with instructions for his mate on where to shove his she-oak.

And the next guy thought "I'm not falling for this BS again", so he called the next tree Bulloak

The only thing consistent is the inconsistency

Originally Posted by dinosour

The only thing consistent is the inconsistency

Well, sort of, but there are obvious reasons for how some trees got their common names. The prominent medullary rays in the wood of casuarinas ('she-oaks') does bear a strong resemblance to those of many Quercus spp ('true' oaks), so surely that one's no problem. There is some debate about the 'she' part of the name, but I think of the suggestions I've read, the most likely is that it means it's an inferior oak (inferior with respect to its workability), though such pejorative use of the feminine is rightly frowned upon nowadays. Resemblance of the wood is obviously also how some members of the proteaceae family ("silky oak" etc.) got the "oak" monicker. One of the early names for red cedar (Toona australis)was "bastard mahogany" , which I think was used to mean "coarse" rather than it was not legitimately conceived. Such a name was, I think, a little unfair, but at least it is a member of the same family (Meliaceae) as the American mahoganies, and the woods can sometimes be hard to tell apart (until you apply the finger-nail test!). Sometimes they used "native" in front of the borrowed English names to reduce confusion a little.

When faced with a whole bunch of totally unfamiliar species, how would you go about giving them names so you can talk about them with your fellow new-arrivals? The language barrier (& no doubt a goodly dash of arrogance) prevented them from doing the obvious, which would have been to ask the 'locals' who had been around for a few millennia & had a pretty good grasp of the local flora & fauna! This did happen later, so that when you get out into the boondocks, you do get a lot more indigenous names for trees - Wilga, Mulga, Boonaree, Belah etc. etc. Remember, the new arrivals came from a land where they only had about a half-dozen hardwood timber species, so they didn't have a large pool of common names to draw on in any case.

Using names cynically for commercial purposes has no doubt happened in a few instances, but I think these are a small minority of the total. I think some of the over-use of northern hemisphere names comes about because of the small number of tree species they were familiar with, & some from nostalgia. Many of the common names they applied are certainly a stretch, as has been pointed out above. In their desperation, the merest hint of a similarity in some aspect seems to have been enough for early settlers to hand out a name like "Ash" (the wood of Eucalypts so-named have a faint resemblance to some Fraxinus spp. woods if you take a very liberal interpretation of 'resemblance'). But it wasn't only the wood that earned a tree its name, just as often it was the standing tree that evoked memories of some northern hemisphere species, so the rainforest "Ashes" like crows ash & silver ash (Flindersia spp.) are named because the leaves look a bit like fraxinus leaves (as long as you don't look too critically). However, when we get to another Flindersia, Qld. Maple, we're back to naming because of a supposed resemblance of the wood to Maple (Acer spp.).

So although there may be more or less rational reasons for the common names, I certainly agree it doesn't in any way lessen the confusion. "Rosewood" is one that has caused me some identification problems over the years. Our numerous rainforest species of Dysoxylum, plus two totally unrelated 'dry country' species (Alectryon oleifolius & Acacia rhodoxylon) plus N.G. rosewood (Pterocarpus indicus) plus the 'true' rosewoods (Dalbergia spp.) are mostly fairly easy to sort out, at least to broad genera, once you know them, but it was a right muddle for me at first.

Unfortunately, not everyone is comfortable using the Latinised binomials, and even if we all tried hard to use them instead of the more ambiguous common names, there would still be lots of mis-identifications & we'd probably end up more confused than ever.

At my age, I'm learning to live with confusion...….

I think that you also have to consider the way a conversation might have gone between a cabinet maker and customer in the first half of the nineteenth century. Customer has a picture (really or in his/her mind of a piece) or cabinet maker has one of the directories. They choose a style for the piece and then talk about the timber to be used. Their conversation will be in terms of oak, mahogany, ash, various fruitwoods, deal (and other pines). Then we come to finding an available local wood. The customer doesn't care about whether it works like the European original. but whether it will look like it in the piece they are ordering. It helps in choosing those woods if they have common names that help to indicate what they might be used for.

Originally Posted by IanW

One of the early names for red cedar (Toona australis)was "bastard mahogany" , which I think was used to mean "coarse" rather than it was not legitimately conceived.

I don't know IanW - I don't think the plants that made those seeds were married. All rather scandalous.

And never mind figuring out where the name Tasmanian Oak came from, I was stumped recently by a piece of red oak that looked far too much like white oak - I did wonder if it had been mixed up by accident.

Originally Posted by IanW

... Unfortunately, not everyone is comfortable using the Latinised binomials, and even if we all tried hard to use them instead of the more ambiguous common names, there would still be lots of mis-identifications & we'd probably end up more confused than ever. ...

So true, you look up a eucalypt and Bootle says it's a corymbia.

Somehow if you call it oak you can sell it for more

Originally Posted by GraemeCook

So true, you look up a eucalypt and Bootle says it's a corymbia.

Graeme, you can blame the botanical taxonomists for that - they've fairly recently shifted a whole bunch of species formerly known as Eucalyptus into the genus Corymbia. However, I read somewhere not so long ago that there's been a move to put 'em all back again, because the genetic differences are too small to warrant separate species status. Spotted Gum is in that group & has a spotty history - once known as Eucalyptus maculata now known as Corymbia maculata, while it has been decided that E. citriodora, which was once given separate species status has been firmly lumped with C. maculata. It's just a clone of that species (originally) from a small area of Qld that happens to make a slightly different oil - the difference between the two is otherwise about the same as us having different hair or eye colour.

There's rhyme & reason behind it all, though it may escape the average woody just lookin' for a bit of wood to work with. Molecular genetics has enabled much more accurate relationships to be assigned to plants, but the way plants breed & evolve & (& yes, you have a good point, Alkahestic, trees don't observe any niceties when it comes to reproduction! ), means there is much overlap as species are separated by climate changes & tectonic upheavals, then get thrown back together by further altered conditions before they have become too different to inter-breed. So it's all very messy & makes it awfully hard to keep family trees (pun intended) neat & tidy, & hard for us woodies trying to find another bit of some lovely wood we chanced on at a woodshow or summat.....

Cheers,

I think the early settlers, primarily the poms, were unimaginative in how they described things. They named towns and cities after places in the old country and they were not much more imaginative when it came to Australia's trees.

Exactly why they came to decide what should be called an "Ash" etc. is unclear to me, but some things fall into place. The Casuarina Oaks, Silky Oak, Tulip Oak all feature prominent medullary rays: In fact more prominent than the "true" oaks so that is quite reasonable to my mind.

Tasmanian Oak is something quite different: It is a marketing strategy as is Victorian Oak. The former comprises, today, Mountain Ash, Alpine Ash and Messmate Stringy Bark (I think originally there were four species, but the fourth one escapes my memory). Victorian Ash is just Mountain Ash and Alpine Ash. In this regard Tasmanian Oak as a marketing platform is a little like Meranti (comprises many Indonesian species as you may realise when you compare the weight of different boards at your timber supplier) and Paulownia, which also is not a single species.

As far as the Eucalypts are concerned it appears that originally it was a huge umbrella. The trees classified now as Angophoras (Rough barked Apple etc) were originally Eucalypts about hundred years ago I think. The Corymbias were reclassified in the 1990s, I think, and I was surprised that there are about a hundred in that category.

Nothing stays the same!

Regards
Paul

Originally Posted by Bushmiller

... Tasmanian Oak is something quite different: It is a marketing strategy as is Victorian Oak. The former comprises, today, Mountain Ash, Alpine Ash and Messmate Stringy Bark (I think originally there were four species, but the fourth one escapes my memory). Victorian Ash is just Mountain Ash and Alpine Ash. ...

"Officially" the Tas Oak and Victorian Ash gropus contain the three species that you list, Paul, but I am not sure who defines and polices the components of those cocktails. I suspect - no one?

Recently, small quantities of plantation Tas bluegum (E globulus) and plantation nitens (E nitens - also know as shining gum) have been detected. A usually very reliable source says that over the years up to 70 species of eucalypt (and/or corymbia) have been detected in the Tasmanian Oak stocks.

My favorite botched common name has to be Desert Oak Some clever bugga must have seen the long needle-like leaves (phyllodes for technical types) and figured it was a Casuarina which had already been given the 'Oak' moniker and these were growing on the edge of the desert so it has to be 'Desert Oak' . . . little did he know it's actually an Acacia and doesn't have any of the 'Oak' like characteristics at all