The term harewood or airwood originally described a type of
maple
''Acer'' is a genus of trees and shrubs commonly known as maples. The genus is placed in the soapberry family Sapindaceae.Stevens, P. F. (2001 onwards). Angiosperm Phylogeny Website. Version 9, June 2008 nd more or less continuously updated si ...
wood, including
sycamore maple
''Acer pseudoplatanus'', known as the sycamore in the British Isles and as the sycamore maple in the United States, is a species of maple native to Central Europe and Western Asia. It is a large deciduous, broad-leaved tree, tolerant of wind an ...
, with a curled or "fiddleback" figure, used to make the backs of
stringed instruments
In musical instrument classification, string instruments, or chordophones, are musical instruments that produce sound from vibrating strings when a performer strums, plucks, strikes or sounds the strings in varying manners.
Musicians play som ...
. In 17th-century England it was imported from Germany. The earliest published use of the term is probably that in the 1670 edition of ''
Sylva'':
In the 18th century airwood came to be used by
marqueteurs; for most
artificial colours they used
holly
''Ilex'' () or holly is a genus of over 570 species of flowering plants in the family Aquifoliaceae, and the only living genus in that family. ''Ilex'' has the most species of any woody dioecious angiosperm genus. The species are evergreen o ...
, which takes
vegetable dye
Natural dyes are dyes or colorants derived from plants, invertebrates, or minerals. The majority of natural dyes are vegetable dyes from plant sources—roots, berries, bark, leaves, and wood—and other biological sources such as fungi.
Archaeolo ...
s very well, but airwood was employed either in its natural off-white state or stained with
iron sulphate to produce a range of
silver
Silver is a chemical element; it has Symbol (chemistry), symbol Ag () and atomic number 47. A soft, whitish-gray, lustrous transition metal, it exhibits the highest electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity, and reflectivity of any metal. ...
and silver-grey hues.
[Peter Weber, ''The Cabinet-Maker's Guide'', 2nd edn., London (1809), p. 9.] The reason that airwood was preferred to holly for this colour was that it gave a
metallic sheen or lustre, while holly dyed by the same process turned a rather dead
grey
Grey (more frequent in British English) or gray (more frequent in American English) is an intermediate color between black and white. It is a neutral or achromatic color, meaning that it has no chroma. It is the color of a cloud-covered s ...
. The use of airwood in this way meant that by the 19th century it was associated specifically with that colour, and at the same time name gradually changed from airwood to harewood.
In a relatively short space of time the action of the
chemicals
A chemical substance is a unique form of matter with constant chemical composition and characteristic properties. Chemical substances may take the form of a single element or chemical compounds. If two or more chemical substances can be combin ...
, together with natural
oxidization, turns harewood brown, sometimes with a greyish or greenish hue, which is how the wood now appears on old marquetry. The notion that harewood and other coloured woods can be produced by injecting dyes into the roots of
trees
In botany, a tree is a perennial plant with an elongated stem, or trunk, usually supporting branches and leaves. In some usages, the definition of a tree may be narrower, e.g., including only woody plants with secondary growth, only p ...
appears to be an old wives' tale of some antiquity, perhaps propagated by marqueteurs to protect their
trade secrets
A trade secret is a form of intellectual property (IP) comprising confidential information that is not generally known or readily ascertainable, derives economic value from its secrecy, and is protected by reasonable efforts to maintain its conf ...
.
References
{{Reflist
Wood by type