North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Donna &/or Kieran" <holycow@cookeville.com>]

Hmmm... it seems peculiar that you are talking about very dense, hard 
grained wood as best for violins.  I saw a TV program many years ago that 
said someone had looked at the wood in some great old violin, Stradivarius I 
think, and said it was porous.  They wanted to figure out how to duplicate 
it using material available back when it was made, so they decided to try 
malic acid.   Now the TV program showed the wood soaking in an aquarium in 
"plum juice".  But I wouldn't be surprised if it was sloes they used.  Sloes 
are extremely acidic, Prunus instititia, and are thought to be an ancestor 
of Prunus domestica.  Sticking with the violin side of the subject for the 
moment, they took that wood and looked at it under the microscope and it 
looked much more like the wood from the antique.  I think they went on to 
make a violin out of it and it sounded good, then they talked about 
producing more like it.  Have any of you heard anything about this?
   On the fruit front, I think that sloes also are hexaploid, like 
domestica.  I have often wondered to myself if there wasn't some way to do a 
cross to get some of the late bloming genes of the European plums 
transferred into diploid plums.  They made crosses between tetraploid and 
diploid roses, and though the results were mostly sterile they did 
eventually get some fertility and lines of tetraploids.  The thing is, that 
with 3 copies from a European plum and one copy from a diploid plum, you'd 
get a tetraploid plant, which seems to be fine for other species in the rose 
family..... but I never heard of any tetraploid species or varieties in 
Prunus.  Have you?
   Concerning trees and lumber in general, it seems that if the special 
wood came from the Little Ice Age, that it would work almost as well to 
collect wood from the northern most reaches of a species range, especially 
from north facing slopes or drier areas of the range or from a very shaded 
place... unless it was something very weird that we can't duplicate, like 
wood that grew with almost no sunspots.     Donna