Friendly Forest Products

Honduras Mahogany

Common Name: Mahogany, true or genuine mahogany, bigleaf mahogany,
Honduras mahogany, Caoba

Botanical Name: Swietenia macrophylla
Family: Meliaceae

Mahogany varies from yellowish, reddish, pinkish, or salmon colored when freshly cut, to a deep rich red, to reddish brown as the wood matures with age. Mahogany is fine to medium texture, with uniform to interlocking grain, ranging from straight to wavy or curly. Irregularities in the grain often produce highly attractive figures such as fiddleback, mottle and very rarely quilted.
Mahogany polishes to a high luster, with excellent working and finishing characteristics. It responds well to hand and machine tools, has good nailing and screwing properties, and turns and carves superbly

The Tree: In the natural rainforest, Mahogany is a very large canopy tree, sometimes reaching over 150 feet in height, with trunks sometimes more than 6 feet in diameter above a large basal buttress. It is a generally open-crowned tree, with gray to brownish-red fissured bark.

Status: Mahogany is perhaps the most valuable timber tree in the whole of Latin America and has been heavily exploited for most of this century. Mahogany is becoming increasingly rare, and is already extinct in parts of its original range. It is listed as threatened in "Arboles Maderables en Peligro de Extinción en Costa Rica" and is listed in CITES Appendix III.


Uses: Mahogany is regarded by many as the world's premier wood for fine cabinetry, high-class furniture, trimming fine boats, pianos and other musical instruments, sculpture, joinery, turnery, figured and decorative veneer, interior trim, and carving.

Very rarely it has a quilted figure like this.