Love them or hate them, it turns out the ubiquitous London plane tree has an exceptionally beautiful wood grain.
That's according to craftsman Andy Ward, who has repurposed timber from an inner-city Melbourne tree for a Design Week exhibition.
"People just can't believe how beautiful the material is. It's a shock. They just wouldn't expect the wood to look that way," he said.
From furniture to knives, a vase and even pencils, the exhibition at vintage and design shop Ma House Supply Store shows the timber has potential.
The exhibition is titled Goodbye London Plane, and the wood for the project came from a street tree that was being cut down and would otherwise have been woodchipped.
But Revival Projects - a Collingwood workshop that specialises in saving materials for sustainable building - managed to collect the timber instead.
Ma House proprietor and curator Ben Mooney bought the timber and gave half a dozen craftspeople an equal share to work with.
"We got the scrappy bits of the tree to be honest, the remnants. So even the scrappy bits are worth something," he said.
Ward constructed a backlit partition featuring a cut out circle.
The piece shows off the wave of the wood grain by day, and has an "eclipse effect" as light shines through the hole when it gets dark.
The hardy London plane tree grows in cities worldwide.
In Melbourne, for example, mass planting during the 1980s and 1990s created a CBD monoculture dominated by the species.
While plane trees provide shade, they release spores that can cause irritation and allergies, and their roots destroy footpaths and underground infrastructure.
The City of Melbourne plans to reduce the dominance of the species over time, to less than 20 per cent of trees in the CBD.
"If that's to go ahead, we should be using the material, because it's really beautiful stuff and easy to work with," said Ward.
Goodbye London Plane is on at Ma House Supply Store from Wednesday until Sunday as part of Melbourne Design Week.
