Boxwood

Also called: buxus

Boxwood is a pale, very fine-grained timber, dense and hard for its size, long chosen wherever a piece of wood needs to hold a crisp edge or a sharp line rather than bulk or strength.

Traditional uses

Holtzapffel (1846) listed the trades that depended on it: boxwood turned well enough to be used for clarinets, flutes and a great variety of other turned work, made excellent lathe chucks, and was the wood-engraver's choice above all others. He also noted that the wood is particularly free from gritty matter, so its sawdust was used for cleaning jewellery, and that the Roman authors already mentioned boxwood as a wood in great esteem at the period in which they wrote.

In joinery and cabinet work

In furniture work boxwood was used less as a structural timber than as a line. Jones (1920) described boxwood stringing, thin strips of the pale wood let into darker timber to mark a border or edge, obtainable ready-cut from cabinet-makers or veneer merchants, and listed it among the woods, alongside sycamore, satinwood, sandalwood and ebony, suitable for such decorative inlay. Joyce (1987) placed it beside holly and stained blackwood as a wood used for lines and stringings, sometimes combined with insets of bone, ivory or mother-of-pearl. Its pale, even colour also recommends it for wooden bench appliances used against a metal blade. Ellis (1932) held that while a shooting board or similar appliance can be knocked together quickly from mahogany or whatever scrap of hardwood is lying about, nothing works as well for a piece meant to last as boxwood does; ebony is just as good to work, but its dark colour hides the plane iron's edge where boxwood's paler colour does not.

As a wear part

The same density that suits boxwood to turnery also suits it to taking wear. Bird (2004) described a wooden plane fitted with a boxwood insert let into the sole at the point where wear is greatest, extending the plane's working life considerably without needing to make the whole body from a harder, heavier timber.