The common Spindle tree (Euonymus europaea) has got its colloquial german name Pfaffenhütchen (parsons hat, bishop's cap) because of the very characteristic red-coloured seed capsules that this shrub produces in autumn. The shrub can rarely grow into small trees. The pale yellow wood, which takes on a brown heart when very old, is very hard, tough, dense and easy to cut; it is excellently suited for instrument makers, watchmakers and is used as so-called cleaning wood for cleaning and polishing the pivots and bores in high-precision objects such as mechanical watches and electrical measuring instruments. It has been traditionally used to make caskets, chessboards and organ pipes, shoe pins, toothpicks and due to its hardness it was the wood of choice for weavers, who used it for the spindles in loomsspindles of looms. The wood is sought for its nearly perfectly fine-grained structure.
