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For decades people thought there was nothing wrong with chopping down trees to make flooring planks. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to use the bounty of nature to make beautiful and long lasting floors. It is only since the 1980s when the Green Movement began to grab headlines around the world that people have begun to slowly wise up to the fact that nature is not limitless; and that natural resources are being depleted at an alarming. We now realize that man’s actions since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the late Eighteenth Century have had a huge impact on the environment. The latest example of this negative impact is climate change. Bearing this in mind it is easy to understand why people are now becoming reluctant to buy hardwood flooring. Even a child knows that trees are needed to produce oxygen and absorb carbon dioxide; and even a child can understand that a tree taken from a sustainably managed forest is still one less tree that is fighting the good fight to deal with man’s growing carbon output.

The answer for those who still want hardwood flooring despite the negative impact on the environment is reclaimed hardwood flooring. This article will look at two types of reclaimed hardwood – walnut and cherry.

Walnut or Juglans is native to many parts of the world including America, Canada, Japan, Europe and Argentina. It is a deciduous tree that grows between 10 and 40 meters tall. The walnut tree is mostly known for its nuts however its timber is also prized. The sapwood is a creamy light color and the heartwood is a dark chocolate color. Walnut is the only dark wood tree native to the United States. This makes walnut a valuable source of dark hardwood flooring. The lumber from walnut is hard dense and tight grained and can be polished to a very smooth finish. For these reasons walnut is great for flooring. And for these reasons it is a good idea to buy reclaimed walnut flooring for your home.  Because walnut grows in many different locations in the world it has been used for centuries as timber for furniture, flooring and construction. Walnut was also a very popular wood to use to make gun stocks because of its resilience to compression along the grain. Thus, there is a ready supply of unused walnut timber that is available to be recycled and reused as reclaimed flooring. The only down side of walnut is that it has a relatively low Janka Hardness Rating (1,010 pounds force).

Cherry (Prunus) comes in three varieties – black cherry, red cherry and wild cherry. Brazilian cherry is not part of the prunus genus. Black cherry grows up to 100 feet or 30 meters. Cherry trees grow in northern America, Europe and Asia. In America the cherry was originally used a cheap alternative to mahogany because the two woods have a similar color. Sadly, today in the States there is no longer an abundance of cherry trees available for commercial use. For this reason it is a very good idea to use reclaimed cherry hardwood for flooring. When kiln and air dried it has a unique brown-purplish hue that really defines a room. Like walnut, however, cherry has a low Janka Hardness Rating (950 pounds force) and so may not be suitable for rooms where lots of people are coming and going.

To source reclaimed walnut or cherry flooring it is an easy matter to find an online directory of reclaimed hardwood flooring. The more local the source for the reclaimed hardwood the lower the transportation costs will be and the greater the benefit will be for your bank account and the environment.