Warb of Fire (@warboffire)

>"Given a fair few species of animal and plant have become extinct in recent centuries, I figured I might have more chance finding a type of wood or herb we don’t have anymore." American Chestnut used to be a dominant tree in eastern North American deciduous forest, and is now functionally extinct in the wild due to a fungus (there are still individual trees, but they're too far apart to breed, and the insect species that depended specifically on American Chestnuts are now extinct so the ecological links are gone). Apparently the wood was very rot resistant and a lot of fenceposts used to be made out of them. They're still grown in captivity but the priority is on finding blight-resistant trees not on farming the wood. From Wikipedia: > "The January 1888 issue of Orchard and Garden mentions the American chestnut as being "superior in quality to any found in Europe".[150] The wood is straight-grained, strong, and easy to saw and split, and it lacks the radial end grain found on most other hardwoods. The tree was particularly valuable commercially since it grew at a faster rate than oaks.[20] Being rich in tannins, the wood was highly resistant to decay" But I think we're much less reliant on good quality wood or medicinal plants now than we used to be. We artificially synthesize the active chemicals in medicinal plants and then don't need the real thing any more. When we use wood, it's mostly cheap wood that can be grown really quickly and then is chemically treated to make it more resilient, instead of starting with slow-growing resilient wood.