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Comment by davidp | Hacker News Reader

This is why hardwoods are, uh, hard. They're typically slower-growing, so their rings are more tightly packed, giving the wood additional strength. I'm skeptical that the fast-grown trees from the article are as long-term healthy as naturally grown ones.

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I believe that the "hard" actually refers to the fact that such trees have a harder shell for their seeds.

From wikipedia [1]

Hardwood is wood from dicot angiosperm trees. The term may also be used for the trees from which the wood is derived; these are usually broad-leaved. In temperate and boreal latitudes they are mostly deciduous, but in tropics and subtropics mostly evergreen.

Hardwood contrasts with softwood (which is from Gymnosperm trees). Hardwoods are not necessarily harder than softwoods. In both groups there is an enormous variation in actual wood hardness, with the range in density in hardwoods completely including that of softwoods; some hardwoods (e.g., balsa) are softer than most softwoods, while yew is an example of a hard softwood.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardwood

> This is why hardwoods are, uh, hard.

General point of interest, but this isn't universally true. E.g. Balsa is a hardwood and is decidedly not hard.

I thought the trees in the article were native species, not special fast-growing varieties. Did I miss something?

Any tree that grows quickly will have thicker (less densely packed) rings. The author describes a planting strategy that "tricks" the trees into growing more quickly than usual, so my intuition is that those trees will be weaker than they otherwise would be. The choice of species just moves the "natural" density point.

growing forest quickly =/= growing trees quickly. I might have missed something, but I don't think he mentions anything about making the trees grow faster.

The "tricks" are to mature the forest (i.e. make it self-sustaining) within 10 years, tree growth-rate notwithstanding.

The article mentions planting them close together and having them compete for sunlight, thus stimulating fast growth.

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