To: "North American Fruit Explorers" <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: [NAFEX] Not really Off Topic--Stradivari's and Guarneri's Violin Mysteries
Date: Sat, 9 Dec 2006 09:58:25 -0600
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