Grain, Texture, and Figure of Wood

Once timber has been seasoned, its visual and structural quality is further described using three related but distinct terms. Grain refers to the structural arrangement of the wood - broadly, the direction and pattern in which its constituent cells and fibres run. Texture describes the relative size and quality of the various types of wood cells present - a fine-textured wood has small, uniform cells, while a coarse-textured wood has larger or more variable ones. Figure of wood is the decorative pattern formed by the grain specifically when the wood is cut in the longitudinal direction; because it depends on both the underlying grain and texture, and on how they happen to be exposed by the direction in which the wood is sawn, the same log can show quite different figure depending on how it is cut. A well-known manufactured wood product that depends directly on grain orientation is plywood, made by gluing together three to nine thin layers (plies) of wood ven …