Bizarre facts about wood

Sometimes you stumble across unusual, bizarre or funny finds about wood and wood relatives, which we will report about here in a loose sequence.

In 2010 at the Cologne furniture fair, a slightly underexposed journalist made a magnificent bloomer: On an exhibition stand of the Italian company Plano Design a huge table from ancient swamp kauri was exhibited. This very durable wood, similar to bog oak, was lying in the ground for a long time in New Zealand and did not rot. A naïve photographer or scriber has photographed this table and apparently on the stand has picked up a comparison to the bog oak, without having even a grain of knowledge of the matter. Poor memory capacity was certainly also part of his basic equipment.
 The table made of Kauri wood mutated into one made of bog oak, and since there is the name 'Kauri' on the wall of the exhibition stand, it had to be the name of the exhibitor. And where does Kauri (smäki) come from? Right, from Finland, and every semi-educated photographer or film-maker knows him, that's for sure. And so an impressive table made of semi-fossil (swamp) Kauri....... turned into a Finnish table made of bog oak from the Kauri company! Even if otherwise a prayer of thrust towards heaven is not our usual means in search of help in matters of education and knowledge:
Lord, let your brains rain - especially on the offices of the !Facts, Facts, Facts!-Focus Journalists! How factful it used to be when the newspaper guy still had his notepad with him, in which he wrote down what he didn't know or didn't recognize, and then consulted his boss, a lexicon or an experienced colleague before typing the article, if something  seemed Spanish (or ij this case Finnish) to him. For an enlarged view please click on the picture! (Foto © Focus online)










The fat years were over shortly after this ash had turned a few years old in France. Never before have we found such an extreme sudden change in the annual growth of a deciduous tree! !
After about 20 years of growth of this burl ash, which ended with an almost 20 mm thick growth ring, much leaner years with normal growths in the mm range, typical for ash, followed.
We would like to know what was going on, what gave this tree such optimal living conditions.
Please click on the picture for an enlarged view!








Traces of war? You don't find metal inside a tree every day, and when you do, the man at the saw curses! In the branch of this tree of life from the castle park of Drachenburg Castle near Königswinter on the Rhine, this copper-coated lead bullet was stuck, and our band saw blade suddenly screamed very loudly and was over afterwards. Fortunately this is very rare. For an enlarged view please click on the picture!

Holes in wood are not unusual either, but rarely does a tree grow so beautifully with a black heartwood around a large hole, possibly eaten by a borer, as in this example of a piece of black and white ebony:

With this piece of Karelian birch we were annoyed at first by the invisible nail hidden deep in the wood, but when we looked at the piece more closely, all employees frowned: how did the nail with the broad head get ahead into the wood, so that now the tip points towards the bark?

Since the tree was certainly 50 cm in diameter, the nail may have been knocked into the wood from the outside of the trunk a long time ago, we will never find out...