With winter well and truly upon us, it’s time to look at methods of keeping warm. Equally useful for the indoor woodburning stove as for the outdoor campfire, a knowledge of the burning qualities of our major native woods is invaluable at this time of year. Gather some Alder on your winter canoe trip and after dark you’ll find it hard to get the fire going, because of the high moisture content. Recognizing the exact species of wood from dead lying branches can be difficult of course, but look up, look up, and you’ll get a clue to what’s providing the wood lying on the ground.

The Woodland Trust provides this excellent guide to the trees of britain which will help with the “look up” part with beautiful and accurate illustrations from the Collins book.

The “Crack Willow” Tree - very common on southern UK river backs and wetlands

Willow is one of my favourite woods and Willow driftwood is common on our river banks where floods surge through in winter breaking branches from the trees which are often half-submerged for much of the year. In this guide the “Crack Willow” is described perfectly:

“Crack willow is aptly named, not only due to the twigs making a ‘cracking’ noise when broken but also because old trees often develop a large crack in their trunk and are prone to collapse.”

The leaf stalk and catkins of the crack willow tree.

And also useful is this old rhyme from an anonymous source gives doubtless hard-won clues as the qualities of the different wood available:

Oaken logs, if dry and old,
Keep away the winter’s cold
Poplar gives a bitter smoke,
Fills your eyes, and makes you choke
Elm wood burns like churchyard mould,
E’en the very flames are cold
Hawthorn bakes the sweetest bread –
Or so it is in Ireland said,
Applewood will scent the room,
Pearwood smells like flowers in bloom,
But Ashwood wet and Ashwood dry,
A King can warm his slippers by.

Beechwood logs burn bright and clear,
If the wood is kept a year
Store your Beech for Christmas-tide,
With new-cut holly laid aside
Chestnut’s only good, they say
If for years it’s stored away
Birch and Fir wood burn too fast,
Blaze too bright, and do not last
Flames from larch will shoot up high,
And dangerously the sparks will fly….
But Ashwood green,
And Ashwood brown
Are fit for Queen with golden crown.

That ryhme from an unknown traditional source was found from an excellent web resource here at www.aie.org which also has a fantastic table of ratings and descriptions of the main wood species which gives a really good overview of the burning and seasoning qualities of different species.