Occurrence of Juvenile Wood

Abstract

Although juvenile wood and its properties were briefly and generally defined in Chapter 1, in this chapter more definitive information is given about the formation and location of juvenile wood. The juvenile wood zone is difficult to define because it is the area from the pith outward where a rapid change in wood properties occurs, prior to the mature zone where wood with more constant characteristics is located. The extent of juvenile wood depends on the properties you define it by. The situation was well expressed by Bendtsen (1978) as: “The demarcation between juvenile and mature wood is not clear because of the gradual change in properties … the actual number of rings in the juvenile core depends upon how juvenile wood is defined … cell length may reach maturity … before cell wall thickness.” A complicating factor is the presence of a transition area between the juvenile and mature zones, making an exact definition of juvenile and mature wood difficult.