How to Identify London Plane

Start with the rays, because plane's medullary ray tissue is its signature. The rays are large and numerous, so even a flatsawn board is stippled with short, fine ray flecks, and a quartersawn face erupts into the dense, freckled 'lace' pattern that gives the wood its lacewood name. If you see a warm golden-tan to medium-brown board covered in small, closely spaced, glinting flecks, plane is the leading candidate. The flecks are shorter and more numerous than the long, broad ray flashes of quartersawn oak.

Read the color and rings. The ground color runs from creamy light brown through golden tan to a medium reddish-brown, with little sharp boundary between sapwood and heartwood, and the growth rings show clearly as darker bands. The texture is fine and even with a soft natural luster — not coarse or ring-porous. Combined with the ray fleck, that fine even ground is a good confirmation.

Check weight, hardness, and end grain. Plane is a medium-density, medium-hard wood: it feels solid but not heavy, and a fingernail leaves a mark less easily than in a soft wood but more easily than in oak or maple. The end grain is diffuse-porous, with small pores fairly evenly scattered and no ring of big early-wood pores — a quick way to rule out oak, ash, or elm, which all show a bold ring of large pores. Plane has no distinctive scent; freshly worked stock smells faintly of nothing in particular.

The classic confusions are with other ray-flecked woods. Quartersawn oak also flecks, but oak is ring-porous with much larger, longer rays and coarser open grain, and it is harder and heavier. English sycamore (a maple, Acer pseudoplatanus) shows fine ray fleck too but is pale creamy white rather than golden-tan and is generally harder and brighter. Australian silky oak and other tropical 'lacewoods' carry ray fleck but tend to be redder, coarser, and heavier. When the flecks are small and numerous over a golden-tan, fine, even, diffuse-porous ground, plane is the answer.