Rough-sawn and looking like a blackened railway sleeper, after a dozen passes through Fair Wood’s thicknesser Mehari’s hunch is confirmed by a familiar dark shimmering, curling, rippled grain. The transformation from dusty raw material to something takes both of our breaths away.    Mehari leaves, Blackwood carefully cradled in his arms, a piece of timber that will sit above his fireplace holding family treasures, its story shared, its grain admired, perhaps for generations. 

In the past hundred years tens of millions of wild Elms were killed across Europe, Canada and the US by fungal diseases. English Elms are especially vulnerable. Melbourne with its six thousand mature English Elm trees lining Royal Parade and the pathways of Fitzroy and Carlton Gardens, has, for now, one of the few remaining disease-free Elm populations in the world.

In Europe’s Alpine regions there are water troughs, bridges and boats made of Larch that have lasted centuries even though they have been continuously submerged in water. In his history of Venice, Cristoforo Tentori wrote that most of the city’s palaces and houses sit atop hundreds of thousands of Siberian Larch piles, driven into the swamps in the early Middle Ages. Larch is unusual -  it’s a pine that drops its needles in the winter. It’s very dense behaving more like a hardwood than a softwood. It likes being wet and ages very well outside, silvering off and hardening as its resins oxidise.