Cutting up wood for the stove this afternoon and came across an interesting one. The whole piece was only about 30" long, 6 or 7" diameter. Bark looked like yew at first glance, so was thinking it might be interesting for turning, so went at it with chainsaw. Which was not happy; thought it must have done a banana cut and was binding, but the cut was fine. The cut surface obviously wasn't yew, as it was a uniform creamy white. Decided to try and split it to see what the lengthwise figure might be. OK, my axe had been doing a lot of splitting this winter, so isn't the sharpest, but it just bounced off the end grain. Cut the log in half on the bandsaw and planed up the surface to get a bit more information, as in the pics below. So what do folk reckon it might be? Two other clues; it's slightly denser than water so just sinks. The other (non) clue is that it came from the University Botanic Garden, so could be ANYTHING, UK or exotic.
