Bois d’Arc

The old reliable fence post. At least, that’s how I grew up seeing Bois d’Arc. Or, as the gnarly trees that dropped those horse-apples I used to pelt my cousins with. I also spent many summers cussing those same trees while I was clearing fence rows. Over all those years, I never would have guessed that Bois d’Arc was such a beautiful, shimmering yellow wood. This stuff is gorgeous. I’d always seen Bois d’Arc wood as a weather-beaten old fence post that had been in the ground a hundred years or more.

Bois d’Arc is a super-hard wood that is resistant to rot, which is why it’s used commonly used as a fence post. It’s also used by bowyers to make recurve and long bows due to its insane strength and resistance to warping. Bois d’Arc is famous for its seemingly magical ability to instantly dull a freshly honed edge on any tool, the reason for many of those four-letter words of my youth. This hardness comes from the high silica content in the soil where this tree grows in East Texas, which is extremely abrasive to tools. It’s also the reason behind the unique shimmer found in Bois d’Arc.