What Is The Difference Between Hardwood And Softwood

Understanding wood

Trees are in essence, plants that can be harvested. If most plants have a fairly short rotation time, measured in week or months, depending in what kind of soil they are growing or in which type of climate, trees are a bit more permanent.
What we mostly use from a tree, it’s its trunk. Of course there are oils and resins, but wood would be by far the ‘ingredient’ we use the most from a tree. That trunk, stays upright for years and it gives the tree the possibility to constantly develop and change its appearance, which it happens through the process of adding a new layer directly on top of all the previous ones, every year.

There are two major different types of wood named hardwood and softwood, and though the names seems to explain exactly their properties, that is not always the case, therefore they don’t always refer to how hard or soft a certain type of wood actually is.

Hardwoods are the ones coming from broad-leaved trees. Some examples would be maple, oak and walnut.
Softwoods are the ones coming from evergreen trees, the ones that have needles and cones and keep them the whole year. For example: pine, spruce,cedar.

As said before, their names might be sometimes confusing, and though it is normally true that hardwoods are harder than softwoods, that is not always the case. Balsa is one
Which means, the questions of whether the world has sufficient wood resources to support such an action in a sustainable way, will rise sooner or later. In order to answer this question, what people need to understand is the difference between deforestation and harvesting a forest. Deforestation is the permanent conversion of forest to non-forest uses such as agriculture or urban development. Sustainable harvesting is the removal of trees with long term replanting and species diversification inherent in the planning process; the forest remains a