Timoho (Kleinhovia hospita L)

[fearn]

Thanks Alan,

That information helps a lot.

If patterned timoho wood is that valuable, I'd suggest going into business making some. It looks like it's easy to grow (link), and it has uses beyond wrongko wood, which means that the whole tree could be used. What someone needs to do is to hook up with a mycologist to culture the fungus responsible for the staining. You get some trees, wound them appropriately (doesn't necessarily have to be with an insect), and inoculate with the staining fungus. Harvest a year or two later. The return from the sale of the wood would be enough to pay for the mycologist's services.

This is just a thought, not a solicitation to go into business. There are people who make a living inoculating wood with commercially important fungi, so in theory this could work. If patterned timoho wood and teak are that valuable, it would be an interesting thing for someone to try.

F

[David]

Originally Posted by fearn

This is just a thought, not a solicitation to go into business. There are people who make a living inoculating wood with commercially important fungi, so in theory this could work. If patterned timoho wood and teak are that valuable, it would be an interesting thing for someone to try.

Well, it is that valuable, but in a fairly limited market, so i am not so sure it would end up being a worthwhile venture.

[A. G. Maisey]

Well Fearn, if you're going to try this, I strongly suggest that you do it somewhere other than Indonesia.

Amongst the people who work with this wood there are two opinions as to the cause of the dark spots:- probably the greater number of people believe that at some time the tree has been damaged, perhaps by a cut, or something else that has caused a wound, and that before the injury has healed, water containing lime has entered the wound. The second group of people believe it is a sickness that can affect any number of trees and plants, nobody gets specific about what sort of sickness.

Many years ago I read an opinion somewhere that it was caused by fungus.

I'd never heard the term "spalting" before I read it here, so I've checked it out. From what I read, spalted wood seems to be quite a bit different to timoho with dark patches. I can recall several wrongkos I have worked on where the wood in the black patch was considerably harder than the surrounding wood, which is the opposite of what people tell us spalted wood is like.

[fearn]

Hi Alan,

Well, I'm nowhere near Indonesia and have no plans to immigrate, so it's not an issue. Creating spalted wood is the kind of nutty thing that mycologists do (they're into that sort of stuff), so it's a potential win-win, if someone has the land and trees to try an experiment. It doesn't even have to be timoho or teak, although that would be traditional.

As an aside, I do have a spalted walnut walking stick. I cut it from a sapling that was in a public right-of-way, and the people clearing the area wounded it with a chainsaw. The spalting was black, and it grew around a bunch of chainsaw slashes exposed to rain, and left sitting for a year. It's about as strong as the walnut around it.

That goes towards the source of the dark stain in timoho: it's entirely possible that it comes from tree wounds open to rain. I'm not sure whether the lime is necessary, but it would be an easy enough experiment to try. It might be that alkaline rainwater in a wound favors the particular fungus that stains the wood dark, and if so, it would be *really* easy to start producing stained timoho. Just slash the bark right before a rainstorm, slather on something alkaline, and let it go.

Spalted wood, in the European sense, specifically refers to a particular wood rotting fungus that leaves a blue stain. It also weakens the wood, but the unusual color makes it a worthwhile tradeoff. There's no particular reason to think that other fungi that stain the wood will similarly weaken it, although they might. A lot of fungi deposit dark stains (usually melanin or something similar) as they grow.

It's an interesting aside. I'm enjoying this, because I didn't know enough about keris culture to realize how important patterned wood was.

F

[kulbuntet]

To Marcokeris...

By the way..love the mendaks on the pics.