Since it’s
spring in most areas of the country, I thought I’d
start this series with a tree that should be in bloom
and recognized by many people.
The tree sees
most of it’s modern commercial use as a nursery tree,
for landscaping and ornamental plantings. Not many
people are aware of the thousands of cords of dogwood
that have been cut for the wood in our past, however.
Although all the ones I knew are now gone, there were
formerly entire sawmills specializing in dogwood
dimension blocks. You might remember only the small
trees like the ones in your or the neighbor’s
yard....but given time, dogwood can get on up there. The
nations largest recognized flowering dogwood, the one
most common, is a specimen in Virginia that is 38”
diameter and 33’ tall.
Dogwood is heavy,
hard, strong and close-grained. It sands, turns, bores,
bends, etc. pretty well. It holds dimension good when
dried. The outstanding property of dogwood has been it’s
wear resistance, and shock resistance. It gets a polish
to it when you rub it repeatedly, and seldom ever
splinters. Millions of shuttle blocks have been made of
dogwood for this one reason...an old shuttle block was
preferred over a new “unset” block for smooth
functioning in those huge, mechanized weaving looms in
the big textile plants, and the more they were used, the
slicker they got. I’ve made some very successful
drawer runners and guides out of dogwood for this very
reason.
The wood
is a pale brown heart, with lighter colored sapwood.
Sapwood is quite thick. Often 30-40 years growth is
still sapwood. Some color variants show a salmon-pink to
red heartwood, with some shades of green on occasion.
The annual rings are indistinct in plain-sawn lumber,
and there are fine ray fleck that appears in the
quarter-sawn face. The amount of ray fleck varies
somewhat with age and size. From what I’ve seen, some
dogwood sapwood is only lightly figured, while some of
the old heartwood may look almost like a piece of
quarter-sawn sycamore.
The disease
dogwood anthracnose is getting into the TN area, and is
wrecking havoc with the dogwood trees. It affects mostly
older trees, and most affects those trees in an
understory....where dogwood most often grows in the
woods. Yard and ornamental trees are less affected by
the disease, but the disease is killing many trees.
Someone who really wanted some dogwood could likely get
up an expedition and get a permit to remove dead tress
from a US Forest Service land, like the Cherokee
National Forest. A day’s cutting could get a LOT of
useable dogwood, and anything not good for woodworking
makes VERY GOOD firewood
