Standing Trees To Exquisite Furniture
Britain has some wonderful timbers available that are unappreciated as such and frequently turned into firewood instead of made in furniture. Sawmills generally are not interested unless you have a 40 tonne load of timber available and even then only if it is right next to a road.
However, having run a tree surgery business for over a decade, I have seen sights that I never would have expected; The timber of one London Plane we had to remove was a bright rose-pink when first planked although it changed to a beautiful golden brown within hours. Yew can have colours such as green, orange and purple in small areas that are all lost as the timber dries. Fresh copper beech wood has a purple tinge that allows you to see the boundary between the copper beech graft wood and the green-leaved stock it was grafted onto. We have seen yew occasionally turn orange or scarlet and stay for a few weeks but than revert to normal seasoned colours. I now have a piece of cherry that went bright orange and has stayed that colour for months.
Even without these rare pleasures, there are many beauties in seasoned British timber; examples are wild cherry, yew, walnut, occasionally elm, London Plane (quarter sawn known as 'lacewood'), as well as the more obvious oak (sawn through-and-through as well as quarter sawn or burr, or brown oak), ash (occasionally olive ash which can be a dark green/brown), and beech which is normally plainer than oak but can have a variety of patterns and colours when spalted.
Fortunately there are a variety of small, portable sawmills that can be taken to the tree if the tree cannot be taken to the mill and these can produce good quality planks from an appropriate log.
Finally small timber drying kilns are available that will produce more timber than a small business can use; mine actually works relatively slowly but produces a better texture of timber than the faster commercial kilns.
British Timbers
These are all seasoned timber from my workshop. Bear in mind that timber colours vary within a single tree as well as from tree to tree or between countries. The colour and patterns will also vary depending on the orientation of the board in the tree.