Backyard Birds – Part 4

Now that I had my drawings sketched out, I could choose the wood for the structure of my cabinet.

I knew that I wanted to use a darker wood, to contrast with the light colors in the background of the marquetry panel. I wanted the cabinet itself to be reminiscent of an unlit room, backlight with the sunshine through the trompe-l'œil window.

Having been a woodworker for over 50 years, my dad has accumulated a lot of boards of interesting types of woods, including a couple large boards of padauk in the garage. He wasn’t sure how long he’d had them, but he remembered that he’d moved them from his old workshop more than 20 years ago. He also wasn’t sure where he acquired them, other than that he didn’t think he had bought them; they were probably given to him by someone – maybe a fellow woodworker offloading a stash, or a non-woodworker who had inherited the wood and didn’t have a use for it. He suggested that one of the padauk boards might be good to use for my cabinet.

Padauk (sometimes spelled “padouk” or “paduak”) is a tropical hardwood. The type of padauk that is most commonly available today is African padauk, but there are also padauk species that grow in Asia.

When sourcing tropical woods like padauk, sustainability and deforestation are major concerns. This page goes into some detail about the complicated environmental considerations around use of padauk. Inhumane labor practices have also been a problem in the logging industry. My dad has a book in his office called Know Your Woods: The Complete Up-To-Date Guide to Woods. It’s not so up-to-date now, since it was published in 1959, but its section on padauk reads:

Padauk, while emanating from Africa, is secured principally from the Andaman Islands, a group of islands in the Bay of Bengal about 650 miles southeast of Calcutta. Most of the settlements here are penal colonies and a great portion of this timber is logged by convict labor.

I think it’s important to point out these issues, even though I didn’t purchase the padauk in question. I’m lucky that I had access to the boards, and it made sense to use one of them for this project, rather than sourcing another board. But if I were thinking about using padauk for another project in the future, these are the issues that I would consider before purchasing any new wood.