Someone mentioned box elder in another post. I work a lot with fancy woods for rifle stocks, pistol grips, and knife handles. Some of the most beautiful are the spalted woods. These are woods high in sugar content like box elder, maple, myrtle, and hackberry. Spalting is usually black lines or circles caused by fungus after a tree or part of a tree dies. When more than one fungus starts eating dead wood, the dark lines form when two different types of fungus grow into contact with each other. They form a "wall" of dark lines...rather like the French Maginot line.
An interesting thing is that the fungus color (sometimes red, yellow, orange, purple, blue, and green is color fast. One researcher at Oregon State University is traveling all over the world looking for different color samples. She wishes to develop techniques to mass produce these permanent colors. They can be seen in 500-600 year old parquet furniture which was once of many colors with now only the stable blue/green fungus colors remaining.
She has a short class on how to produce spalting, the proper water content and temperature to keep the wood and sells different funguses..
I've made some really neat materials for my products.
Pete
