the.com/mahogany
the wood so beautiful we logged it nearly to extinction, then mourned it in furniture catalogs
means A hard, reddish-brown tropical wood prized for fine furniture, or the deep reddish color of that wood.
from English borrowed 'mahogany' in the 17th century, but its deeper root is murky — its first recorded appearances are tied to the wood being shipped from Jamaica and the Caribbean. It may come from a word in a now-vanished or poorly recorded indigenous language of the region, possibly Carib or another Amerindian tongue, though no source can be pinned down with confidence. The honest answer is that the trail goes cold in colonial logbooks: we know where the wood came from, but the word's first speakers were not the ones writing it down.
- violin secret
- prized for resonance in guitars and fine instruments
- trade ban
- big-leaf mahogany is CITES-protected against illegal logging
- deep color
- darkens richer with age and sunlight exposure
- ship origins
- Spanish galleons were built from Caribbean mahogany
- slow growth
- trees can take 60 years to mature
cuban mahogany — prized wood from the caribbean, historically harvested from cuban forests, now protected and rare
honduras mahogany — commercial species (swietenia macrophylla) from central america, main source for furniture since the 1700s
african mahogany — different genus (khaya) from west africa, often substituted for true mahogany due to deforestation