Indian Rosewood
Karnataka in southern India, whose capital is the major city of Bengaluru, is a region with a booming forestry industry and forestry activities.
In this area, we have begun efforts to conserve the trees that are essential for making guitars.
Indian Rosewood
Scientific name: Dalbergia latifolia
Indian Rosewood is a species of the prominent Indian genus Dalbergia that is distributed primarily in the Karnataka and Kerala regions of the southern part of the Indian continent. It has long been recognized as a high-end material for luxury furniture and guitars, and in India, is even more precious than teak (Tectona grandis), which is valued as a luxury material worldwide. It is used in a wide range of applications such as railway sleepers, building materials, and wooden machine tools. While Hubballi in Karnataka boasts large numbers of naturally grown large-diameter trees, most of the timber currently in circulation was planted as a shade tree on British-owned coffee plantations in the early 1900s and grew into artificial forests. The heartwood of Indian Rosewood is a useful material with an air-dried density of 0.7 to 0.9 g/cm3 and is exceptionally durable and easy to process. Wood from the natural native forests and the artificial forests is remarkably different in color—the former is a deep reddish purple, while the latter is dark brown. Forests have long been planted in India and Southeast Asia, with Indian Rosewood plantations in Indonesia going back to the early 1900s. Widely distributed today, timber from these plantations is called Sonokelin, and is currently used for the back and side boards in guitars, where it rivals those models that use mahogany for the same parts.
CITES Appendix II Listed Species
Indian Rosewood logs gathered in a government depot
Tibetan Buddhist Monastery (Mundgod, Karnataka)
