I thought it was sassafras but now I'm doubting myself. It's very, very heavy and the grain was quite tight and quite hard to split. No knots in this round and the smell was more faint than the sassafras I remember. Cherry perhaps? Any guesses?
Yes it certainly is firewood!! But I think the fibers are too thick for maple. All the maple I've seen has very very fine, tight grain. The smell is more fruity/minty too.
After thinking about how hard it was to split with the maul I'm pretty sure it is wild cherry. I gotta go back there for more of it.
Any chance it’s black birch? Wintergreen smell at all? I got some a couple months ago that looked very similar; I know there’s a lot of variation in the species.
That was what I thought at first as well but the bark is all wrong for black birch and the meat is too light for black birch. All the birch I've ever seen has the horizontal striations not vertical like this.
The aforementioned black birch I got recently. It’s hard to tell now but when I first cut it, the heart wood was darker. Here’s one growing in my front yard. Bark is totally different.
I thought maple at first but after Eric's post i zoomed in and studied more and id say black birch too. The end cuts match for fresh cut birch.
I just read a post on some random forum talking about how the black birch horizontal striations in the bark change as the tree gets way older. It does have that minty smell but it is not that strong at all which is also weird given it was a live tree that was just cut down. I just went and looked closer and lo and behold I do see those horizontal striations!! Black birch it is! Need to whip out the splitter to process these rounds! Thanks for the help all.
If you get underneath the bark into the cambium layer that’s when you’ll start to smell wintergreen. It’s throughout the wood though.
25:" DBH black birch growing in my woods. Pic of bark at ground level and a few feet up and view up the tree
I think it's probably black birch too. The bark changes dramatically with the age of the tree making it difficult for me to identify at times. I also can tell the mature ones because they have a blue hue to the bark. I tell my kids look for the blue trees to pick them out. Look at all those pics of black birch in this thread, bark looks a little blue...
Take a fresh piece of splinter and chew on it a bit. You’ll know it when you taste it . Tastes like Birch Beer to me or gum. Not a gum chewer tho so,,,,,, I’m always grabbing a small fresh branch when I’m working in the woods.
That sounds amazing. I will do that next time! Oh wow those pics really show the "younger" striation bark vs the "newer" / "older" bark haha. The black birch I've seen always had dark brown wood so that threw me for a loop too.
Definitely black birch. An older one, maybe a bit over 100 yrs old. The bark gets really roughed up over time. Here’s a pic of one of the oldest ones I’ve seen. Definitely over 200 years old.
