re:wild

Timber that has spent years under water carries a particular fascination. It has been held apart from air and from time, and when it comes back into the light it seems to bring some of that stillness with it. Three names tend to appear in the same breath: sunken wood, submerged wood and bog oak. They are often used as if they meant the same thing, but they describe three quite different stories, and the difference matters when you are choosing a material for a home or a project.

Sunken wood: logs that never reached the mill

Sunken wood comes from trees that were felled on land, deliberately, and then moved or stored in water, most often in rivers and lakes, which for a long time were the easiest way to carry timber to the sawmill. Some logs became waterlogged and sank, and they stayed on the riverbed long after the people who cut them had gone.

Sunken wood comes from live trees that were cut on purpose.

That is how Elodie Delonca, CEO of Triton Timber, puts it. Recovered sunken logs can be very beautiful, often from old trees with close grain, but they are found one at a time, in whatever quantity a river happens to have kept, and so supply is irregular. We have written more about how sunken logs are recovered from rivers and reservoirs.

Submerged wood: forests that died standing

Submerged wood, sometimes called underwater wood, comes from forests that were flooded when large reservoirs were created, most often for hydroelectric dams. The trees were never cut. They died where they stood, roots still in the ground, as the water rose around them, and they have remained there for decades since. As Elodie explains:

Underwater reclaimed wood comes from standing trees that were killed when reservoirs were flooded decades ago.

Scale is what sets it apart. A reservoir floods a forest whole, so a single lake can hold a great many trees, of many species, side by side. In the reservoir that supplies The Submerged Wood Collection, Triton estimates that around 9 million cubic metres of timber are available, all of it recovered without felling a single living tree. You can read more in our conversation with Elodie Delonca.

Bog oak: thousands of years in the peat

Bog oak is older again, by a very long way. These are trees, mostly oak but also pine and yew, that fell into peat bogs and fens and were buried there, often for several thousand years. In the airless, acidic peat, the tannins in the wood slowly react with iron in the water, turning the timber from honey to deep brown and, in time, to almost black. It is, in a sense, wood on its way to becoming stone.

In Britain, bog oak is found in the fens of East Anglia and in parts of Ireland, usually uncovered by chance when land is drained or ploughed. Each find is small and irregular, the timber is difficult to dry without splitting, and it is prized for exactly that rarity: inlays, small pieces of furniture and objects, rather than whole floors.

Why doesn't wood rot under water?

Wood rots because of fungi and insects, and both need oxygen. A post standing in a garden pond decays fastest at the waterline, where it is wet and in the air at once. Below the surface of a deep reservoir, or buried in silt or peat, there is almost no oxygen, so that decay simply cannot begin.

Held like this, timber can stay sound for decades or centuries, its colour and grain intact. Peat goes further still, slowly changing the colour of the wood itself, which is why bog oak comes out so dark while submerged wood keeps the natural tones of its species.

At a glance

Sunken wood: logs felled on land and lost in rivers, often a century old or more. Found log by log, so supply is irregular.

Submerged wood: standing trees lost when reservoirs were flooded, under water for decades, preserved by water without oxygen. Natural species colours, and available at the scale of a whole project.

Bog oak: trees buried in peat, often for thousands of years, darkened to near-black by tannins and iron. Small, rare and difficult to work.

Which one, for which project

For a single piece, a table top or an inlay with a story to tell, bog oak is hard to equal. For a floor, a staircase or the joinery of a whole house, the question becomes one of quantity and consistency, and that is where submerged wood comes into its own. A recovered forest can supply the same species, colour and grade from the first room to the last, in timbers that are increasingly difficult to find through conventional forestry, and some of them durable enough for decking and boats.

The Submerged Wood Collection brings more than 35 species recovered from flooded forests to the UK, exclusively through Re:claimed. Download the catalogue to see the species and their uses, or request material samples.