Zelkova: From Village Shade Tree to Board

Zelkova (Zelkova serrata) is the first tree that catches the eye at the entrance to a village. It lives long and grows large, so it was planted as a pavilion tree or village guardian tree. Even today, zelkova is particularly common among the old trees designated as protected trees. As timber, it is hard and has a distinct grain, making it highly prized for traditional furniture since ancient times.

When sawn straight, the grain forms mountains

Zelkova is a ring-porous wood in which rows of large vessels run along the boundaries of the annual rings. As a result, the beginning and end of each year are clearly defined, and when the log is sawn into boards, those boundaries appear as layers of mountain-shaped grain. Freshly sawn boards have a yellowish-brown cast, becoming lighter toward the edges.

When the same tree is cut across the grain, those boundaries become concentric circles. Dozens of closely packed annual rings fill a single round slice, allowing you to trace with your finger how much the tree grew each year.

Burl wood around burls and branch junctions

The straight trunk is not all there is to zelkova. When a branch junction or a former burl is sawn, the annual rings can no longer flow in a single direction. Instead, they curve around several small centers. In woodworking, zelkova with this kind of pattern is classified separately as burl wood. It comes from the same tree, but its character is entirely different from that of a straight-grained board.

Burl wood varies greatly in shape. Along edges where the bark has fallen away, a rippled, wrinkled surface remains, while a mass formed around a burl is closer to a sculptural object than to a board. For that reason, these pieces are often used with their unfinished edges preserved as cantilever shelves or low table tops, or simply stood upright as objets d’art.

The place where the branches divided

When the section where the trunk split into two is cut whole, it produces a V-shaped cross-section. The outside retains its rough bark, while separate sets of annual rings turn through each of the two upper cross-sections. It preserves the moment when a single tree split and continued growing as two trunks.

Woodway currently has more than 100 zelkova boards, blocks, round slices and burl pieces. Even within the same species, the grain changes completely depending on where in the tree a piece came from, and because every item is one of a kind, the same pattern will never appear again.

ZelkovaKorean woodsGolden-brown to red-brown

Photo: Woodway Smart Store product photos (2026). For the process of turning logs into boards, see “The Day the Log Was Sawn.”