Wood from Madeira

I visited Madeira in the summer. The name means "wood" in Portuguese and there are many exotic (at least for me) species of wood. So I knew that the best souvenir would be a piece of some local wood.

First I got a piece of tree heather. It is a bush from the heather family and it grows in the mountains just like the mountain pine grows in Europe. And likewise it is sometimes trimmed when it starts overgrowing the hiking trails. So I just picked a piece of branch left on the roadside. The wood was apparently very dense and later I learned that it was also partially heat-resistant.

Then I got several pieces of acacia. Unlike the tree heather, acacia is not native to Madeira, it was imported from Australia. It is often used as firewood (the owners of the restaurant/grill were surprised why I asked for a piece of wood but I got it for free). The wood is light but hard and it has nice colors.

At first I thought that both logs I got were from acacia. But after splitting it was apparent that one wood has different color, grain and hardness. It looks like some sort of oak to me, but I'm not completely sure. Maybe I'll be able to identify it later.

One more picture of the wood from Madeira: tree heather on the left, the unknown wood in the middle and acacia on the right.