TREE OF LIFE
Greg Betza
Illustration
Renowned for its incredible figuring and beautiful tone, Honduran mahogany
f r o m Th e Tr e e h a s i n s p i r e d a n d m y s t i f i e d l u t h i e r s f o r d e c a d e s .
Adam Perlmutter
Story by
Pa g e
53
Bedell’s one-of-a-kind Lucky Strike features
back and sides sourced from The Tree
54 Gui tar af i c i on a d o
R A B e at t i e
One day last summer, I sat with a guitar case at my feet, awaiting a return flight
from the Healdsburg Guitar Festival in Santa
Rosa, California. An older gentleman seated
next to me was eyeing the case with a look
that suggested he wanted to talk about
instruments. Upon making an introduction,
he unzipped his overnight bag, rifled inside
it for a moment, and retrieved an object
whose identity was obscured by Saran Wrap.
Looking around nervously, as if conducting an illicit transaction, he carefully peeled
away a bit of the covering to reveal a luminous brown portion of wood with the most
intricate wavy figuring. “This,” he said, with
a twinkle in his eyes, “is The Tree!”
As it happened, the gentleman was a
seasoned woodworker new to guitar making.
He’d gotten his hands on some singular
quilted mahogany that for years has driven
many woodworking and guitar enthusiasts to
distraction. Unlike ordinary mahogany—the
straight-grained and reddish-brown stuff—
this timber is unique in its appearance, with
heavy figuring that is thought to be the result
of a genetic defect. Adding to its allure is the
fact that this quilted mahogany, which has
been used by Bedell/Breedlove, Lowden, Santa
Cruz, R. Taylor, and other makers, is from a
single tree—The Tree, as it has been dubbed—
that has a long and fascinating story.
The legend of The Tree began almost 50
years ago, when a group of loggers deep in the
Chiquibul Jungle of Honduras, now Belize,
discovered a giant mahogany tree, 100 feet tall,
with a 10-foot base and spiraled bark that gave
a hint of its intense figuring. When the loggers
felled the tree by ax, in 1965, things went
terribly wrong. Against their expectations, it
landed in a ravine, where it proved impossible
to extricate even after being halved by a tractor.
The tree had been resting in the ravine for
more than a decade when sawmill owner Alan
Mauney rediscovered it. He brought it to the
attention of Robert Novak, an American wood
importer who happened to be in the area in
search of rosewood. Flooding prevented them
from visiting the fallen tree for a month. When
Novak at last encountered it, he immediately
sensed its magnificence and entered a protracted
bidding war that involved several other parties.
The nature of their business ended up
working out in his favor.
55
“The other bidders wanted the wood for the
purpose of veneering, and they had a lot more
money at their disposal than I did,” Novak
says. “But after about a year, they became
afraid that, because the tree had been down
for so long, it wouldn’t veneer well. So, around
1981, I ultimately won out.”
Novak then faced the challenge of how to
remove the tree. A clever solution was devised:
the two felled logs were quartered with chainsaws where they lay. The wood was dragged
out of the ravine and trucked, three pieces at
a time, 100 perilous miles through the jungle
to the Chiquibul River. There, a loader slowly
pushed it, piece by piece, into the river and
pulled it the final 100 feet to the carriage ramp
of an ancient steam-powered sawmill. Novak,
who oversaw all of the milling, finally got a
glimpse of the tree’s intense figuring when it
was flat sawn. “There was a strong wow factor,”
he says. “It was some of the prettiest wood I’d
ever seen in my life. And it still is.”
The Tree’s dramatic figuring is classified in
three main categories. One pattern resembles
a tortoise shell, its triangular shapes having
dark veiny outlines. Another is often referred
to as a sausage quilt, as its wide horizontal
patterns bear a resemblance to links of that
product, with rolling vertical lines that look
like long, wavy tendrils. The third type of
figuring is blistered, which, with its effusion of
irregular curly shapes, is the wildest variation.
While all three varieties are dazzling, the
tortoise-shell pattern is most wildly coveted
by guitar makers and their clients.
The milling operation for Novak’s wood
stretched out for nearly two weeks and yielded
12,000 board feet of timber. (A board foot
is 12 inches by 12 inches by one inch, or its
volumetric equivalent.) The cut wood was then
shipped to Miami, where, due to its density,
it was kiln dried for 30 days rather than the
standard dozen. It was then carefully stored
and sold from a warehouse in Miami as well
as through Handlogger’s Hardwoods, in
Sausalito, California.
Nylon-string luthier Mark Berry, then a
woodworker and avocational musician, recalls
his first impressions of the wood. “I remember
going to Handlogger’s and seeing the wood
when it had just come in,” he says. “It looked
incredible, but starting at 10 dollars per board
foot, I thought it was outrageously expensive.”
Today, wood from The Tree sells for as much
as $1,500 per board foot. Initially, however, it
failed to make a strong impression on the guitarbuilding community, as mahogany was still
considered a commonplace, budget tonewood.
56 G uitar af i c i on ad o
Richard Hoover, founder of the Santa Cruz
Guitar Company, recalls picking up a sample of
The Tree when it first arrived at Handlogger’s.
His small, fledgling company was trying to make
a name for itself—the boutique guitar industry
had not yet taken off—and he decided that
working with The Tree would be too risky. “At
that time, mahogany was regarded as suspect,
and rosewood was the choice tonewood for an
expensive guitar,” Hoover says. “It didn’t make
any sense to confuse the market or challenge
our credibility as guitar makers.”
Berry was more the typical customer for
the wood. He bought about 250 board feet
It was some of
the prettiest wood
I’d ever seen.
And it still is.”
— R o b e r t N ova k
of The Tree from Handlogger’s and used it
to make high-end furniture. Because of the
intensity of the figuring, he found it well
suited to Japanese-style cabinets, with their
elegant simplicity. Other craftsmen used
their portions for applications like conference
tables and wall paneling, where it lent a stately
appearance. Widespread interest in The Tree
ensued when Berry wrote an article about
it for the September/October 1985 issue of
Fine Woodworking magazine, and as supplies
dwindled, the prices of the wood edged up.
“People started telling me I could make a lot
of money partnering up with a mill to make
guitar woods from my stash,” he says.
Back in 1985, Berry had more than financial motivations in mind when he took a stash
of The Tree to Luthier’s Mercantile; he wanted
to see The Tree turned into playable art. The
company processed enough of his wood for
50 guitar sets, but at the time it had yet to
make traction with instrument makers. When
Santa Cruz finally used wood from The Tree
for a limited run of Vintage Artist guitars in
the early Nineties, the going rate had reached
that of good Brazilian rosewood, around $90
per board foot. The Tree wasn’t exactly the biggest draw of these 10 guitars, though. “We got
a very good response to that series because it
was such a limited edition, and because of the
association with Doc Watson,” Hoover says.
“But people didn’t quite know what to think
about the wood.”
Around the same time, luthier Tom
Ribbecke began building with wood sourced
from The Tree. Beginning in the mid Eighties,
he worked at Luthier’s Mercantile, where he
built customized jigs and developed ways
of efficiently cutting The Tree for use as
tonewood. Ribbecke was on a hiatus from
instrument making for much of the time he
was there, recuperating from lung damage
that he attributes to chemical overexposure
through art projects and instrument making.
Even so, he couldn’t help but wonder how
he might someday put The Tree to use in a
musical instrument. “When I first saw the
wood, I was overwhelmed by its spectacular
beauty,” he says. “But I was faced with an
obvious question: How would a builder make
it sound good?”
Once his health improved and he resumed
building instruments, Ribbecke received a
commission for a steel-string guitar with back
and sides from The Tree. After closely studying the wood’s properties and behaviors, he
engineered an internal bracing system to best
suit its stiffness-to-weight ratio. “To make this
particular mahogany move like a speaker cone,
I developed an energy-efficient spider bracing
based on the Fibonacci series,” he explains.
To Ribbecke’s ear, this wooden speaker
cone had a splendid tone, resembling a cross
between koa and rosewood, and it displayed
an impressive amount of headroom. “The
sound of The Tree is warm and beautiful, so
woody,” he says. “[Guitarist and composer]
Muriel Anderson once told me that archtops
have no bass, but I’ve found carved-top guitars
made from The Tree to have a bass response
that is almost overwhelming.”
Ribbecke has now exploited the sonic and
cosmetic beauty of The Tree in more than a
dozen different guitars. The most recent is a
matched trio of instruments—an archtop, a
steel-string, and a bass—each featuring a onepiece back made from the tonewood. Having
gotten to know the wood so intimately in the
process, he speaks of it in the most reverential
tones. “To me, this material is a gem of the
earth, representing a sacred trust,” he says.
“I’ve tried to bring it to the highest possible
place in my work, to tell stories with this wood
that has such a compelling history.”
Another artist celebrated for his masterly
use of The Tree is Harvey Leach, the luthier