Thread: Carrotwood ? Australian willow ?

Hi John,

Carrotwood I am not familar with. But I had a go at Willow a few years back and heres what I found. I picked up a couple of short logs around 12-18" in dia. One I sealed up and left the bark on and dumped it on the back of the garage. A dark cool spot out all possible draughts etc and promptly forgot all about it.
The second I roughed it out and dumped it in a 50/50 soap water solution it was in there for about three months... I forgot it finally pulled it out and finished it off, no cracks and no warping.
But its a bland soft and some what featureless timber, it can have some faily fibrous sections to it. That will need special attention, such as razor sharp tools and light cuts, failing that I ended up sealing the worst part with a diluted solvent based varnish and sanded the problem away.
The only real saving grace was the colour, the soap coloured the timber about the same colour as the smillie in this sentence. Gave it away as lemon willow, a rare and hard to find tree.
The second piece I threw away not wishing to waste any more time on the darn stuff, incidently it did not crack at all and was very dry after about 12 months in the garage.

John, the only thing I've turned that might be close to your willow was called Stringybark Willow by the arborist.

Deep bark intrusions; quite dense and fine grained; pinkish to mid brown in colour; sometimes a bit of distinct figure, other times nothing much. And good to turn mostly ... some of the bowl blanks were unusable as the trunk cross section was so irregular. Bit like a four-leaf clover.

Did some small to medium bowls and one tool handle out of it. Like it a lot.

Good luck with your haul anyway.

Problem with common names is that they can be quite local.
Here, Australian Willow would refer to what's more commonly called Wilga, Geijera parviflora. But my guess is it might refer in USA to Casuarina equisetifolia, common coastal tree of weeping habit, known here as Beach Sheoak.
A Google search tells me that Carrotwood is another of our salt-tolerant species, Cupaniopsis anacardiodes, known here as Cupania or Tuckeroo.
Now I've propagated tens of thousands of these but never worked with the wood of either species, but there should be turners here who are familiar with them.

Thanks for that info Wizened.

I have some Tuckeroo, but It hasn't turned yellow at all. It is used widely as a street tree down here and is a favourite of mine. Didn't know is was salt tolerant but I do Know the spiders love it!