Wood is judged by a few characteristics, not the least of which is hardness. Most simply, you can choose a hardwood or a softwood, but you need to know some things first. Hardwoods are not necessarily hard, and softwoods might not be soft. When we speak of hard and soft, we speak botanically. If you have chosen a hardwood, you have chosen a tree that flowers. Softwoods are conifers or evergreens. Most hardwoods are indeed harder or denser than softwoods, but there are exceptions to the rule. Generally speaking, hardwoods are more valuable and more expensive than a softwood. The wood is more scarce. The exception is Gum, which is very competitive in price with softwoods. The most practical way to identify a wood is by grain and color.
What makes a wood grain appear as it does? When you talk about grain, you are talking about the cell structure of the tree. The cells in a hardwood tree are tubular. These cells are c alled vessels, and they are visible only as pores in the wood. Large cells make for a rougher grain that appears more open. With these woods, you may need to get a filler to smooth the surface. If your wood has small cells, you will get a smoother texture. Woods like this are called close grain. Now do you see why the type of wood in that new home theater system you are building really matters? Examples of open grained woods are oak, mahogany, teak, rosewood, and ash. Note that these are woods often used for outdoor or heavy indoor furnishings. A softwood does not have a vessel cell structure, so practically speaking you can consider them close grained.
You probably learned in school that the age of a tree is measured by growth rings made of the cells formed during the growing season each year. If the type and arrangment of cells matter in how the wood looks, these rings are what do it. Some woods have a very clearly defined grain, while others appear more smooth. In wood furniture and flooring, you see flat grains along with stripes, swirls, eye spots, and ripples. You can find wood with just about any type of texture imaginable. As for color, wood can be as dark as midnight black and as light as an eggshell white and every shade in between. Each species has a particular grain and color to it, with some variety between individual trees. The characteristics are normally well defined enough to identify the type of tree your wood comes from.
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