Ash

Ash belongs to the olive family, although its only fruit is a dart-like winged seed. Ash is a great craft wood, but best known as the wood of choice for baseball bats. Ash is a popular species for food containers because the wood has no taste.

The wood of the ash is a valuable commodity, due to the quickness of its growth and the toughness and elasticity of its timber, in which quality it surpasses most other trees. The wood is straight-grained, open pored, and hard, with no distinctive taste or odor. The wood is heavy, strong, stiff and hard, and takes a high polish. It is tough and yet elastic, with high shock resistance and excellent steam bending characteristics. Ash wood always fetches a good price being next in value to the Oak and surpassing it for some cases, for it matures more rapidly than Oak and is just as valuable as a sapling wood.

The sapwood is light-colored to nearly white and the heartwood varies from grayish or light brown, to pale yellow streaked with brown. The wood is relatively stable with little downgrade in drying. It only occasionally shows interesting figure in crotch wood. The wood is generally straight-grained with a coarse uniform texture.

Ash mainly can be used for furniture, flooring, doors, architectural millwork and molding, kitchen cabinets, paneling, tool handles, baseball bats, hockey sticks, billiard cues, skis, oars and turnings.