A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1323 entries
spalting
Spalting is the patterning that fungi draw in decaying wood: fine black lines wandering through pale timber, marking out irregular compartments, sometimes with zones of bleached white and stained color between them. The lines are barriers, laid down where two competing fungal colonies meet and each walls itself off from the other, or where one walls off a change in the wood.
Etymology
The word is a woodworker’s term of uncertain origin, possibly related to spall, meaning to split or flake off. The technical term for the black lines is zone lines, and the underlying process is called interaction zone formation.
Notes
Spalted wood is prized by turners and furniture makers and is difficult to obtain, because the window between attractive figuring and structurally useless punk is narrow and unpredictable. Woodworkers now inoculate blocks deliberately with specific fungi and control the moisture to produce it on purpose, which turns a defect into a crop.