Super-Chatoyant Staghorn Sumac

Let’s have a look at this super-chatoyant Staghorn Sumac set of samples, obtained from 9 different individual trees from a single population. These were collected in May 2025, and a special thanks goes to botanist Guido Maspoli for his essential support and for kindly sharing his knowledge. Analysis was performed in July 2025.

Some of these samples show unusually light-coloured heartwood growth rings (hereby referenced to as “white bands”. This picture shows the logs highlighting two evident examples of “white bands”:

The logs, some of which clearly show the “wite bands”

These are the resulting samples:

These are two examples of white bands on the samples:

An example showing the “white bands” – Log 7 – 29.8 PZC

Another example, flat cut throug the “white band” – Log 7 – 28.3 PZC

Chatoyance was measured on all the 30 samples, yielding a total of 90 measurements, summarized here showing extremely high values – the 32.5 PZC average exceeds all timbers tested so far (including acacia koa and acacia melanoxylon, which average around 26÷27 PZC):