The paradox of stained wood: why it does not rot in the water and can last 500 years

Boggy wood, as you know, costs several times more than ordinary wood. But what is so valuable in a tree trunk that has been lying in water for 50, 100 or 500 years? And why is wood, being in water, not amenable to rotting processes, as it happens to it on land?

Today it is customary to call it black gold, and in the pre-industrial era so-called bog oak was a valuable building material from which durable houses were built. Although today, in the professional environment of woodworkers, bog oak is called black gold.

Bog wood is a tree (a whole trunk or some parts of a tree) that has lain in water for more than 40-50 years. Such wood has special properties and is used for the manufacture of exquisite figurines, caskets, interior items and even jewelry. But not all tree species lying in the water can produce high-quality stained wood.

Traditionally, bog oak and bog larch were considered the most valuable stained varieties of wood. The wood of these species has a high density, so heavy logs, if they fall into the water, sink to the bottom. This is very important, because if a tree floats on the surface of the water, then the process of decay will inevitably begin. But in the case of immersion of the trunk to the bottom, in water, and often under a layer of silt under conditions of low oxygen content, specific processes begin to occur in the wood. Transformation and conservation of wood is a long process that takes at least 40-50 years, and even better 200-300 years, and the standing water of lakes or swamps is optimal for it. The tannins contained in the tree bark interact with the salts contained in any fresh water, making the wood very hard and strong.

But the main problem associated with the extraction of stained wood is the difficult process of lifting it from the bottom. Such trees are incredibly heavy, often buried under a thick layer of silt, and in most cases scuba divers and special equipment are required to extract them.

But it’s not enough to get a stained tree trunk out of the water, it is necessary to dry it correctly. The fact is that the wood raised from the bottom of the pond needs to be dried slowly. Without a special delayed drying procedure, it cracks, fiber breaks, such wood no longer has any value. Therefore, according to experts, real high-quality stained wood should dry for at least a year.

If in Europe valuable stained wood has long been raised from the bottom, then in our country there are significant reserves of this valuable building material. The largest stocks of bog oak are concentrated in the rivers of the European part of Russia. In addition to it, trunks of aspen, birch, pine and some other species lie here. Well, Siberian rivers are rich in moraine larch, which was at the bottom both during floods and as a result of rafting of the forest. The heavy larch instantly sank and sank to the bottom, and some riverbeds along which the timber was rafted were completely littered with tree trunks. Also a lot of stained wood is located at the bottom of Lake Baikal. And how the rise of Baikal stained wood occurs, you can watch in this video.