The Four Walnuts
Most people have only ever seen one of them.
Walnut is the wood everyone thinks they know. Dark, even, dependable — the safe choice in a furniture showroom.
That is one walnut out of four, and it is the plainest one.
The other three grow on the West Coast, and what happens to them out there — bigger trees, more weight, more stress in the grain — puts figure into the wood that the eastern trees almost never produce. Fiddleback. Marbling. Color that shifts as you walk past it.
I build with the western three. This page is what separates them.
Why the Pacific Northwest
Out there the trees grow bigger, and the weight presses figure into the wood.
I source my slabs from the Pacific Northwest for that reason and no other. A wider slab means a single-slab top instead of a glue-up. A stressed tree means figure. An old tree means both.
Every piece I build starts with a specific slab, and the design follows what that slab is already doing. That is what I mean by functional art in walnut — the wood leads, and the piece is built around it.
Common questions
Which walnut is the rarest? Bastogne. It is a hybrid that just doesn't reproduce naturally, so it exists only where a Claro and an English walnut happened to cross. There are no Bastogne plantations.
What is the difference between Claro and Bastogne walnut? Claro is a species; Bastogne is a hybrid of Claro and English walnut. Claro runs to wild color — orange, purple, ink-black. Bastogne runs to density and figure — tight fiddleback and a glassy, silken surface, with a warmer, more even ground color.
Is Oregon black walnut the same as eastern black walnut? No. Eastern black walnut is Juglans nigra, the midwestern species. Oregon black walnut is Juglans hindsii, the western species, and it carries far more figure and color variation.
What is fiddleback? A rippled figure running across the grain that appears to move as the light or your eye changes position. It is called fiddleback because the same figure has been prized in violin backs for centuries. Claro and Bastogne produce it; eastern black walnut rarely does.
Can I choose the slab my piece is built from? Yes. Every commission starts with the slab, and you see it before anything is cut.
Do you work in eastern black walnut? The shop is built around Pacific Northwest walnut — Bastogne, Claro and Oregon black. If a piece calls for something else, that is a conversation.
Bastogne walnut
Bastogne is a natural hybrid of English walnut and Claro walnut — a Paradox hybrid. It is not a species you can plant. It just doesn't reproduce naturally. Every Bastogne slab comes from a tree that happened to grow, happened to fall, and happened to reach a mill before it rotted.
It is the densest of the walnuts, and that density is what you see. The grain closes up tight, and a finished surface takes on a depth and a glassy sheen the softer walnuts don't reach. Cut close to the heart of the tree, the compression grain throws a chatoyance that shifts and moves with the light.
Heartwood darkens through chocolate and amber. Pale gold sapwood glows at the edges.
If a slab is going to stop someone in a doorway, it is usually this one.
Claro and Oregon black walnut
Claro is the wild one. Reddish-brown running to orange, purple and ink-black, with the color moving in broad bands rather than sitting evenly across the slab.
It is the species most likely to hand you fiddleback — the rippled figure that appears to move under the light as you shift your head. Heavy curl and crotch figure show up in Claro slabs that would be a once-a-decade find in eastern black walnut.
Oregon black walnut comes off the same tree family, grown further north. Same wild grain, often a deeper ground color.
English walnut
The lighter one. Golden-brown to pale amber, sometimes olive, with dark streaks running through the growth rings.
English is the parent that gives Bastogne its fine texture and its lighter ground color.
Eastern black walnut
The native midwestern walnut, and the one most furniture is made from. Uniform chocolate heartwood, straight grain, predictable across a whole board.
That predictability is the point of it, and it is also the limit of it. A twelve-foot eastern black walnut top will look very much like the next
