{"id":1256,"date":"2016-02-24T04:00:16","date_gmt":"2016-02-24T08:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.woodturningpens.com\/?p=1256"},"modified":"2016-02-24T04:00:16","modified_gmt":"2016-02-24T08:00:16","slug":"thuya-burl-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.woodturningpens.com\/thuya-burl-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Thuya Burl"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
The wood most commonly known and sold as Thuya Burl is known to botanists and other plant scientists as Tetraclinis articulata<\/em>. This is the only species in the genus. T. articulata<\/em> is now only found in very small areas of the Mediterranean, although it is possible that it once was more widely distributed given that it is one of the few conifers named in the Bible, in Revelations 18:12, where it is referred to by another common name, “citron wood.” Currently, the only known significant stands of T. articulata<\/em> are found in Morocco, northern Malta, and southern Spain around the city of Cartagena.<\/p>\n T. articulata<\/em> is more properly referred to as a shrub rather than a tree in most cases and it is rare to find an example large enough to yield actual timber. Instead, it is almost exclusively the underground burl, only found on mature trees that have endured multiple rounds of growth and destruction of the main trunk due to fire or over-grazing by sheep and goats. Young trees will not have burls. At one time, burls were only collected from dead trees and could only be discovered by digging into depressions left from trees that had died and rotted away. With a burgeoning market in Europe and North America, harvesters started to dig up living mature trees. This practice is fatal to mature trees. While the trunk can be harvested without killing the tree completely, as is explained below, burl harvesting is inherently fatal and this has led to dramatic reductions in available trees.<\/p>\n