Melbourne's Rare Elm

Selling timber at Fair Wood is a mix of matchmaking and storytelling - our inherent drive to make things also comes with a deep desire to know the story behind the timber.

 

On Saturday a couple walk-in, they're planning to install a five metre long timber benchtop in their home - if possible they want to make it from one piece of timber. 

 

Our option for something as long as this is Elm.  

Looking through a stack of English Elm slabs salvaged from a dairy farm in Leongatha, the couple don’t know yet but they’re among the few people in the world that still have the opportunity to build with this once common timber. 

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.

 

We find the perfect Elm slab, which of course is the one at the bottom of the pile.  Elm's interlocking grain will not only make a stunning benchtop it'll resist splintering and cracking (that's the elm slab being thicknessed in the pic above and at the bottom).

 

As well as elm Fair Wood is full of rare and special timbers diverted from mulchers and bonfires by passionate local sawmillers or grown in tiny plantations by tree-curious farmers - there's Chestnut, Japanese and Himalayan Cedars, American Red Wood, Western Red Cedar, Mexican Pine and Larch - all have unique characters and their own stories.