Why Hardwoods Are The Softest Woods

Not all hardwood trees have hard wood and softwoods soft wood, because these terms denote their taxonomic ancestry, not the wood's actual hardness.

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To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:
- Angiosperm: a plant that has flowers and produces seeds enclosed within a carpel.
- Gymnosperm: a plant that has seeds unprotected by an ovary or fruit.

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Julián Gustavo Gómez | Script Writer, Narrator and Director
Josh Taira | Illustration, Video Editing and Animation
Ever Salazar | Audio Editing
Nathaniel Schroeder | Music

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REFERENCES
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Botes, Christo, Steven D. Johnson, and Richard M. Cowling. "The birds and the bees: using selective exclusion to identify effective pollinators of African tree aloes." International Journal of Plant Sciences 170.2 (2009): 151-156.

Laboratory, Forest Products. Wood Handbook: Wood As an Engineering Material. United States, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013.

Minea, Vasile. Industrial Heat Pump-Assisted Wood Drying. United States, CRC Press, 2018.

Plomion, Christophe, Grégoire Leprovost, and Alexia Stokes. "Wood formation in trees." Plant physiology 127.4 (2001): 1513-1523.

Ramage, Michael H., et al. "The wood from the trees: The use of timber in construction." Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 68 (2017): 333-359.

Simm, Jonathan, and Crossman, Matt. Manual on the Use of Timber in Coastal and River Engineering. United Kingdom, Thomas Telford, 2004.

Wei-Dan Ding , Ahmed Koubaa , et al. (2008)
Relationship between wood porosity, wood density and methyl methacrylate impregnation rate, Wood Material Science &

[MinuteEarth]

More fun categorization confusions: You know those two softwoods mentioned in the video, Eastern Red Cedar and Northern White Cedar? Taxonomically, neither of them are in the "cedar" genus and are not even in the same genus as *each other*. Eastern Red Cedar is in the juniper genus and Northern White Cedar is in the thuja genus.

[janmelantu]

The “softwood isn’t always softer than hardwood” is the first thing you learn in materials engineering

[LuxAeternum]

In German, we classify them as "leaf trees" and "needle trees" (literal translation), , which usually corresponds to the scientific categorization (at least from my non-botanist point of view)

[Shnarfbird]

I think the title should say 'Why SOME hardwoods are the softest woods'

[angeldude]

So it _was_ based on hardness, but then scientists found that the harder wood tended to share other properties, so "hardwood" changed its definition to be based on those properties than from... being hard. So then when a "hardwood" was discovered that was softer than the types of wood previously categorised as "softwood, " rather than just accepting that the families only sometimes correlate with hardness and and use "hardwood" and "softwood" to distinguish based on hardness, they instead said "Nope. 'Hardwood' is not defined by hardness even if it used to be, so this soft wood is officially a hardwood."

Let's be honest, if you actually care about the genetic properties, then you should be familiar with "angiosperm" and "gymnosperm." The people who care about the type of wood that don't know those terms are likely to be carpenters or others who care more about the wood as a material, in which case the hardness is an actual concern.

[stauner]

The Runescape reference made me happy :)

[Lone.Willow]

LOVE the Runescape reference. Someone on the MinuteEarth team spent a few too many hours cutting down Oaks outside of Draynor Village...

[raindropdreams]

As someone who works with wood, I was always taught that softwoods have an open grain structure (you can see the grain pores in the cuts), while a hardwood has a closed grain structure, so you generally can't see holes or pores in the cuts

[Ihwaz]

Separating into hardwood and softwood still makes sense in carpentry as hardwoods are typically more homogeneous than softwoods which usually have a stronger contrast between early growth and late growth rings.

[AidanRatnage]

Wow, never thought I's see a 2007scape reference here.

[jek__]

You can use balsa wood for real airplanes too, it's a pretty decent substitute for the hexagonal grid structure that exists inside the shell of the wing of a high end airplane. It has a lot of strength on one plane, and almost none perpendicular to it, so when used with precision it can be quite strong

Oh man I love that little ending where you try to bury the idea and they just grow back. Fantastic visual wordplay, would have been a poignant end :P

We should just split the terms hardwood and softwood into two categories. Hardtrunk and hardwood, and softtrunk and softwood. Hardwood refers to when the wood itself is hard, hardtrunk refers to when the living tree itself is hard. So balsa would be hardtrunk softwood. It's intuitive, simple, and removes the confusion

[richardhall]

Tree-mendous: I see you, dad joke.
Let’s not even start about going out on a limb..

[CarlDaCool]

My woodworking teacher was laughing his ass off when we did a kahoot to celebrate the final day of the program and he gave us the question “True or False: the softest wood is a hardwood” and then when most of the class got it wrong he just went “Yeah balsa is a hardwood because it’s from an angiosperm” and we were all like “SO WHY DO THEY CALL THEM A HARDWOOD” and he was like “Ask someone else”
well I guess my questions were answered.

[joseville]

When they say, "how much wood can a woodchuck chuck?" are they talking about a softwoodchuck or a hardwoodchuck?

[linkpatrick]

"Tree-mendous" hit me like an anvil falling on my head.

[szlatyka]

In Europe I believe everywhere "hardwood" and "softwood" are purely carpentry/engineering terminologies (meaning balsa is 1000% softwood), while for biological categorization we use "needle tree" or "leaf tree" (or something similar depending on the language).

[Henrik]

In Norwegian, we call them "needle trees" and "leaf trees". Up until recently, I thought English did, too. Solves the whole issue.

[LengThao]

These RS bots are getting out of control ..

[JustinY.]

Now if only Stardew Valley didn't require you to have a stronger axe to shop down hardwood!

[janAlekantuwa]

Love that in RuneScape, the distinction between hardwood and softwood is "Is exclusively used to make planks for Construction" and "Is not exclusively used to make planks for Construction." Teak and Mahogany are correctly categorized as hardwood, but Oak, Willow, and Maple are all incorrectly called "softwood." The only true softwood trees in the game are, funnily enough, the most difficult trees to cut: Yew and Redwood, and also pine trees which are actually modeled as spruce/fir trees but are treated as standard nameless trees