So I was trying to think of some interesting woods to compliment my collect of magical metals, cultural weapons and anthro people. I found a lot, but I'm interested in additional ideas.
http://www.wood-database.com/ Too many, I can't even
Valuable Woods:
http://www.mostexpensivelist.com/top-10-most-expensive-wood-in-the-world/Highlights include ebony, African blackwood, which is like ebony, pink ivory, which is bright pink, purple heart, aka peltogyne which is purple, and bocote, which has a cool yellow and black stripy pattern.
There are apparently various kinds of multi-colored ebony, such as dalmatian ebony, tiger ebony and pale moon ebony.
http://www.exoticwood.biz/woodchart.htmThere are a lot of red colored woods on the chart, plus two blue-grey woods, blue mahoe and buckeye burl.
Boxwood is a valuable white wood, counterpart to ebony. American holly (ilex opaca) is amazingly white, it looks amazing.
Apparently the most valuable wood is calamander/coromandel wood which is now extinct. It has an attractive stripey pattern.
Hard Woods:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janka_hardness_testA list of woods based on their janka hardness rating.
http://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/top-ten-hardest-woods/More detail of 10 of them. Highlights of the two include lignum vitae, quebracho, which comes from "quebrar hacho" axe-breaker, snakewood, which looks cool, and African blackwood again from the valuable wood list.
Lignum Vitae vs axe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRSMfEmMUs4 Lignum Vitae bokken (sword)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iFnsvAq028 Note that hard materials are not necessarily good weapons or armor, as they are prone to break instead of bend of dent. There is an entire class of woods known as ironwoods (softwoods<hardwoods<ironwoods) which are between woods like oak and woods like lignum vitae, that might have more ideal weapon-like properties. Not sure I want to try and actually translate ironwood properties into DF material properties. As far as I know and I haven't dug too deep, ironwoods are more common in tropical climates and rare in temperate climates, and of course are difficult to work, thus they were relatively unknown in medieval Eurasia.
Fantasy Woods:
There are a couple of myths of true iron wood trees whose branches are made of iron. I could either make them out of real metallic iron, or give irontree wood the same material properties as iron, which means it couldn't be turned into steel.
I remember an Indian legend about a place where the trees' roots dig deep and leach up valuable metals and gems in their environment, giving them characteristics like golden bark or gemstone fruits. Also easy enough to do, but maybe a bit overpowered.
I feel like there should be more, but most tree myths have nothing to do with their material properties.