Thread: quote from book

and Balsa is a hardwood... Go figure

Is this an American book that the "quotes" are from??

hardwood trees donn't lose there leaves in winter.

"softwoods sutchas pine, douglas fur, and cedar come from evergreen"

many softwoods are not evergreen trees at all australian cedar is deciduous.

I may be wrong wiesy but you have contradicted yourself there....Australian red cedar (toona australis or Cedrela toona ) is a hardwood....unless there is another Australian cedar im not aware of....which is quite possible


cheers
BD

I'm fairly certain Australian cedar is also a hardwood, there may be some anomalies in the above descriptions specially when one considers tropical species, but generally they are correct as far as my year 8 biology memory goes.

I think there's a more fundamental cell structure difference that's most simply explained here:

microstructure –The essential difference between the wood from hardwoods and softwoods is the presence of vessels in hardwoods. These are continuous pipes running the length of the tree and serve as conduits for water and nutrients in the outer layers of wood in a growing tree. In hardwoods, the cells are closed and cannot function as conduits. In softwoods, the cells have openings to other cells. This means the cells are the nutrient conduits. The actual cells in the softwood species have the same function as the vessels in hardwoods. The open cell structure of softwoods makes them generally more receptive than hardwoods to preservative treatments to enhance durability.

Good luck proving the other quote's wrong weisy!

cheers,

P

if australian red cedar and white cedar as well as westurn red cedar. are hardwoods then i quit this world is mad.

Originally Posted by watson

Is this an American book that the "quotes" are from??

not sure i think it may be english but it dosent say.

dont give hope completly yet Weisy.... Im pretty sure Western red cedar is a softwood


cheers
BD

but Balsa and Paulownia are definitely hardwoods.

See you Weisy!


P

Softwoods come from conifers, generally everything else is a hardwood.

Not all cedar is true cedar. A true cedar tree is a softwood. Western Redcedar is a conifer but not a true cedar, so it's a softwood. Is Australian cedar a softwood? I'm pretty sure it's not.

You're right about the first bit though. Not all hardwoods are deciduous.

I think this is just a case of an old-fashioned general definition not really being applicable across the board because it was based on northern hemisphere observations.

This article in Wikipedia discusses hardwoods and how they differ from softwoods.

If you click on List of Woods, half way down the page you will find Aust Red Cedar in the list (Toona ciliata or Toona australis)

Weisy, have you ever heard of the expression "A little learning is a dangerous thing?" I grew up in Nth Qld, and to me "hardwoods" came from the open forest, and were mainly Eucalypts, while "softwoods" came from the rainforest over the hill. Easy. But since then I've lived in a few other countries and parts of Oz, & life ain't quite so simple.

This topic has been visited a number of times before on the BB, so at the risk of boring repitition, here we go again......

In fact there are very good reasons why northern hemisphere people lump wood into those two categories. It happens to be a pretty good guide to the properties of the timber, where they come from. Without getting too technical on the botany (I can't, because it's been a few years since I did Botany I! ) trees come in two broad groups, those related to the pine family, which do not make 'flowers', and those that do. This is an absolute difference. However, because it is kind of difficult to define "flower" in everyday lingo, you can use slightly less-technical means of categorising, such as non-deciduous vs deciduous, but simpler classification systems suffer from having to have exceptions - for example, Larches, which are technically softwoods and so should be 'evergreens' are actually deciduous (and also have quite hard wood). And everybody loves to quote Balsa, which is technically a hardwood, because it comes from a flowering tree, but happens to have rather soft wood.

If you want to go down to the next level, the softwoods, or gymnosperms all have a very different wood structure from the hardwoods - it is sometimes quite obvious, as in Pinus crapiata, but sometimes you need a lens to see the structure (Hoop pine). This is also totally consistent, and any wood technician worth half his/her salt can instanly tell you which type of wood you have from a quick look at the end-grain.

In Oz, we have a relatively smaller number of gymnosperms (pine family), compared with flowering trees (angiosperms) but the list is probably a LOT bigger than you think. In the northern hemisphere, most of the gymnosperms have needle-like leaves, whereas most of ours don't. However, in general, the hard/soft division works here, too - think Kauri /Hoop/Bunya vs Ironbark. However, there are inevitable exceptions, & the so-called "Cypresses", which are true gymnosperms, are quite hard, to the point they make quite satisfactory flooring.

So the hardwood/softwood system works pretty well for most of the world (and it is a VERY widely-used system!). However, it has the limitations inevitable in any over-simplified classification scheme.
Cheers,
IW

People just don’t get it do they. Press it with your finger nail. If it leaves a mark then it is softwood. Otherwise it is hardwood. Can anyone think of an easier definition?

Yeah and like maths is that simple