Collecting Treen


The essence of collectable treen - items made from wood - is something useful, hand made ... possibly carved ... simple ... and curious. Some say size matters: treen must be as small as a bobbin, Welsh love spoon, grain measure, sewing egg, tea caddy, nutcracker, fruit or mixing bowl, breadboard, butter pat, smoking or snuff related knick-knack, card box, love token or paper knife. Others are happy to include larger objects, such as spinning wheels, dough troughs, bookracks or trays in their collections. Most collectors insist that any element of machine manufacture goes against the grain of true treen. This excludes factory-made Tunbridge Ware, with its mosaic veneer patterning, and later Mauchline Ware (usually sycamore) with its applied tartan decoration or printed views; earlier Mauchline was in fact hand-painted and therefore qualifies. The attraction of treen lies in the eye of the beholder: yew, elm, oak, beech, and boxwood offer endless variations in coloration and figuring. Treen is also exquisitely tactile - a rich patina suggests years of handling, personalisation through use - and some collectors buy nothing but palm size, hand-turned or carved pieces to use as harmless therapy, rather as certain collectors of glass paperweights are known to do, the late Truman Capote being one.

Most treen can be picked up for small change, though something like a wassail bowl made of lignum vitae - a hardwood tree large and close grained enough to yield a bowl well over a foot across - can make hundreds of pounds at an upmarket furniture auction. Just as through history man has used whatever material fell easily to hand to build his home - earth, reed, stone, ice - so he turned to simple, available, materials, like wood, to make household vessels for drinking and platters for eating off. Easily worked local woods - beech, ash and elm - were the first choice for plain throwaway items. For more painstaking, decorative attention the choice was likely to be oak, mahogany (imported from the West Indies after the early 18th century), sycamore, olive and the fruitwoods. In Britain whoever made the wooden item also usually used it - or at least it became a family possession. Europe has a tradition of bespoke work, where a craftsman would make items to a wealthy customer's specifications. Other pointers to foreign treen lie in exotic woods (bamboo; amboyna, a walnut-like wood imported from the East Indies in the 18th century; or kingwood, a purplish Brazilian wood import used since the 17th century. Beware of modern treen copies, especially where surface decoration, such as scorching with a poker (pokerwork), or staining can disguise newness or suggest age and wear. Collectors live fairly happily with the odd split or wormhole; after all, earlier owners probably did! To get more of a handle on the look and range of treen visit Birmingham's City Museum in England, home to some 7,000 exhibits, some dating to medieval times.