French Walnut Veneer

French walnut is European walnut — Juglans regia, the same species grown for nuts across France, Italy and the Balkans — and it is a different timber from the American black walnut most of this catalog means by “walnut”. It grows slower and in poorer soil, which tightens the growth rings, and it carries a lighter, more golden ground with gray and olive running through it where American walnut goes chocolate and purple-brown. Highly figured parcels have been sold as Circassian walnut for two centuries; it is the same wood, selected.

The livelier grain is the whole reason to specify it and also the thing to plan around. European walnut varies more within a single log than American does — streaking, marbling and color swings from leaf to leaf are characteristic rather than defects, and a run graded for uniformity will reject a lot of perfectly good veneer to get there. Decide early which you are buying: the character, or the consistency. They pull against each other and the price follows whichever you choose.

European logs also run smaller than American, so leaf widths are narrower and a wide elevation needs more leaves to cross it. Supplied in sequence from a single flitch, raw or laid up as two-ply for radius work, paper-backed, or pressed to architectural panels. Ask for a sample from the actual flitch before you commit — on a species this variable, a photograph of somebody else’s log tells you very little.