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Originally Posted by Mike Arnopol  Well, I've opened another can of bass worms. I was told by Bruce Harvie of Orcas Islands Tonewoods that the green stuff ( Home Depot ) was actually Magnolia and the instrument making one ( not gray or green ) was tulip. I know that Lombardy was what the Italians used, but had hoped to find a suitable American equivalent. So black poplar, eh? |
It gets even wormier -- they're all magnolias. I have almost zero expertise in biology and plants and stuff, but if you go to Wikipedia, for example, and look at the latin names used in the classification of these plants, the root of the word "magnolia" is in there....
I wouldn't go to bat for the "black" or "Lombardy" part of the poplar thing, but the family name
populus I believe is solid.
Liliodendron tulipifera -- the green stuff -- is native to North America and has leaves that look like maple leafs. Very familiar to a Canadian like me! The
populus stuff is related to (the same as? Help me, you foresters out there) cottonwoods and aspens. There seems to be more variety in that family and it seems to be more spread around the world.
It's wierd -- even among people with lots of wood experience the poplar thing is iffy. Different names, different ideas.... I had 25 years of woodworking experience before I realized there was a difference -- to me, poplar was always the green stuff. Once I started snooping around instrument-building I learned about the ambiguity.
