6/12/1998 Brazilian Rosewood

Brazilian rosewood up close.

Brazilian Rosewood (Dalbergia nigra) is now controlled by the CITES treaty and you don't see it in guitars very often due to the scarcity of legal wood. I don't think that Brazilian sounds any better than other woods, (and I have been testing guitars for over thirty years), but some pieces have spectacular color and figure.*

I sliced this specimen to about 10 microns and stained it with methylene blue. It is a radial view, as if you were looking from the bark to the center of the tree. I think that this wood is just as lovely, if not more so, under the microscope as it is at normal scale.

[microscopic view of rosewood]

It is difficult to see in this image, but there are small inclusions of mineral crystals in some cells and resin filled canals, which give the wood its gross color and figure, and make it so hard on sawblades. It is this internal "junk" that makes one tree so different from the next. D. nigra is a coastal hardwood, and two trees that grew a kilometer apart might have a completely different look when they were sawed open.


For the taxonomically minded,
  • Kingdom: Plantae
  • Division Magnoliophyta (the angiosperms)
  • Class Magnoliopsida (the dicotyledons)
  • Subclass Rosidae
  • Order Fabales (beans and others)
  • Family Leguminoseae (hey, beans again and peas and alfalfa!)
  • Subfamily Papillionoideae
  • Genus Dalbergia
  • Species nigra etc. I welcome any corrections to the spelling or capitalization of the previous.

    *("Figure" is the pattern that you see on a piece of wood. "Grain" is often used incorrectly for "figure". If you want to get a handle on what "grain" means, think of the plane that a piece of wood would split along if you drove a wedge into the end. It will split "along the grain".)

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