WATTLE
Acacia wood, also known as wattle, mimosa, or cutchwood, is a thorny tree native to Australia, India, and China, and has been used for thousands of years to tan leather and dye fabrics.
When British settlers arrived in the Antipodes in the mid 19th Century they built shelters using the ancient ‘wattle and daub’ method of weaving together twigs and plastering them with mud. Because acacia was plentiful and its thin twigs were flexible, the trees were named ‘wattle’ trees. The Australian poet Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833-1870) would write ‘in the spring when the wattle gold trembles, twixt shadow and shine’.
