$1,000,000 tree?

[Ron Wenrich]

Your flaming birch example looks quite a bit like curly birch.  I talked to a guy whose father sawed curly birch for propellor props during WWII.  He was up in Ontario and got $15/Mbf, but it had to be clear. 

Most of our birch is black birch (Betula lenta).  Quite a bit has that dark heart, and sometimes it gets streaked.  I just turned a pen from one of those dark hearts, and I thought it looked better than the cherry did.

I've also heard sycamore called lacewood. 

Of course, there's always wormy maple that they call Ambrosia maple. 

[SwampDonkey]

Yup, I'll agree that birch looks like curly and not at all like what we call flaming birch here. Some people even call curly, tiger strips, especially when polished like glass. Similar to that of tiger maple. I think you can see it also is some of Daren's lures. Getting back to your black birch though, some regions actually call it cherry birch. I had a friend living in Va that I tried to explain this to, but had to end up quoting text and latin names. According to my sources the only black birch in Canada where a small grove of about 50 trees west of Port Dalhousie, near the top of a long steep slope of deep rich soil facing Lake Ontario.

[urbanlumberinc]

Would this be considered flaming Birch?  I had been calling this spalted Birch, as several of the other boards cut from this tree had distinct "roadmapping"

[SwampDonkey]

looks like curly on the grain. In yellow birch there is the odd tree that has pink sapwood between the heart (all xylem wood) and the cambium. Alot of yellow birch has dark heart anyway, but this is pink as cherry. Some doors on my bathroom cupboards are flaming birch. You get the flaming affect when the wood is peeled for veneer only the doors don't show the effect I want to show. I was at a local sawmill a few years ago and they were saving out the flaming birch for the veneer buyers.