Spalting Wood History - Essay Example

Although there was a reduction in the use of spalted wood in art and craft between the mid-16th and early 20th centuries, scientists have been continually using spalting in wood. In the early 1900s, there was an increased interest in spalting for people who knew it as a craft material, a biological artifact, or those that saw it as a nuisance that needed control. The anamorph of Chlorciboria as Dothiorina Tulasi were classified by Hohnel (1915), Robert Hartig in a 1900 publication Lehrbuch der Pfanzenkrankheiten, wrote the fungal cause of blue-stained lumber and suggested the fungus Ceratostoma piliform which is currently known as Ceratocystis pilifera, widely known as blue stain fungus as the culprit.

Fredrick Tom Brooks filed a patent in 1913 called Improvements in or Relating to Colouring and/or Preserving Wood because of the possibilities of pigmented spalted wood (Brooks 1913). Brooks was comfortable enough with the green stain pigment production of the Chlorociboria genus to induce it artificially in wood, which he retrieved from the work of Vuillemin, despite that during this time, the work of fungi on wood was on the onset of development. Brooks used single spore isolations to inoculate sterilized wood, incubated it under wet and sterile conditions, and dried the wood before decay could take place.

His identification of the specific genus that creates the unique blue-gree wood of historic intarsias was perfect. The specific species that he would like to work with Chlorosplenium aeruginous and Peziza aeruginosa are detailed in his patent as fungi that can produce green stain in wood and are limited to the colonization of other wood decay fungi. Today, spalting is induced by similar processes to Brook’s inoculation method. Brooks’ patent came up when pigmented wood found on merchantable timber was being investigated heavily to find out the cause.

In 1903, the United States Department of Agriculture released a long bulletin named The ‘Bluimg’ and the ‘Red Rot’ of the Western Yellow Pine, with Special Reference to the Black Hills Forest Reserve (Von Schrenk, 1903).