The woods

Five trees do most of the work in traditional stick-making. This is what they are, where they grow, and why each one ended up in different sticks.

• Ash

  Fraxinus excelsior

  The springy, impact-resistant wood of staves, tool handles, and the Irish hurling stick — and the species now in the middle of a Europe-wide health crisis.

• Bamboo

  Various — see species table below

  Not a wood at all but the stick-material of half the world: a giant grass that grows a finished culm in three to five years and underpins the entire East Asian stick tradition.

• Blackthorn

  Prunus spinosa

  The hedgerow tree behind most Irish sticks: dense, dark, slow-growing, and beloved of hedge-witches.

• Cherry

  Prunus avium

  Wild cherry — the British and Irish native fruit-wood that produces some of the most attractive show-grade walking sticks in the working tradition, with the heartwood deepening to a rich amber-red over decades of use.

• Chestnut

  Castanea sativa

  Sweet chestnut — the English coppice wood with the second-longest continuous working tradition in Europe, and a stick wood that competes honestly with oak at lower density.

• Crab apple

  Malus sylvestris

  The native British and Irish wild apple — dense, tight-grained, exceptionally fine in figure, sized below the canonical stick-wood range, and producing some of the most attractive hand-stick and short-cane pieces in the working tradition.

• Elder

  Sambucus nigra

  The pithy-core protective-folklore tree — light, surprisingly hard once seasoned, with substantial cultural register across British and Irish folk-tradition and a small but legitimate working-stick use.

• Hawthorn

  Crataegus monogyna

  Blackthorn's hedgerow companion: lighter in colour, no less dense, and the fairy tree of British and Irish folklore.

• Hazel

  Corylus avellana

  The coppice wood par excellence — light, springy, abundant, and with the longest unbroken folk-tradition of any British or Irish tree.

• Hickory

  Carya ovata (shagbark); Carya glabra, C. tomentosa, C. illinoinensis, others

  The American shock-wood: harder than ash, denser than oak, and the standard timber of axe handles, baseball bats, and the bo staffs of Western martial-arts practice.

• Holly

  Ilex aquifolium

  The pale-wooded thumb-stick tree of Scotland and Wales — and the harder-than-oak hedgerow shrub that sometimes turns up in Irish work too.

• Malacca cane

  Calamus scipionum (and related Calamus species)

  The colonial-era gentleman's cane material — a climbing palm, not a tree, and a solid rattan, not bamboo.

• Oak

  Quercus robur, Quercus petraea

  The other Irish stick wood — older, heavier, and the source of the original Wicklow shillelaghs.

• Olive

  Olea europaea

  The Mediterranean stick wood: gnarled, dense, golden-figured, and the inheritor of three thousand years of continuous cultivation.

• Other woods of note

  Various — Malus sylvestris, Prunus avium, Fagus sylvatica, Salix spp., Cornus spp., Sambucus nigra, Taxus baccata

  Crab apple, cherry, beech, willow, dogwood, elder, and yew — the second-tier stick woods that supplement rather than replace the canonical hardwoods.

• Rowan

  Sorbus aucuparia

  Mountain ash, the Scottish protective tree — folklore-laden, occasionally walked-on, never the working backbone of any stick tradition.

• Willow

  Salix alba (and related Salix species)

  The lightest viable working stick wood — soft, springy, traditional in lowland hand-stave use, the canonical cricket-bat material in one specific cultivar, and a distinct lighter-weight option for weight-sensitive carriers.

• Yew

  Taxus baccata

  The European longbow wood — long-lived, immensely strong-for-weight, two-toned in grain, toxic to work, and the most dramatic of the British and Irish native stick woods.