HAVE A SEAT 

Bamboo, Rattan, Wicker, Rush or Cane?

by Fred Taylor

Old chairs very often have seating material that is - well you know - that woven stuff that comes in old chair seats. Its not fabric, its not leather, its not cowhide, its.... What exactly is it? That depends of course, but first determine what it is not.

More likely than not, it is not bamboo. Bamboo is what old fishing poles look like, brownish with large segments and obvious growth joints every ten inches or so. Some furniture is made of bamboo which is bent to shape and wrapped with natural fiber binding or leather strips to secure the joints but usually the seating portion is upholstered or has a loose cushion on it because bamboo is not very comfortable. So unless you are sitting in a bamboo chair you don't have a bamboo seat.

What it also probably isn't is rattan. Rattan is the stem of a type of tropical palm tree most often found in commercial quantities in Borneo. The stem has its leaves removed and the outer skin scraped off. It can then be bent to shape to make furniture. Larger pieces are steam bent and smaller ones are merely soaked to provide flexibility. Larger pieces of rattan look like bamboo with the hard outer shell removed and rattan furniture closely resembles bamboo furniture. It also usually has wrapped joints but in newer pieces the wrapping is often plastic made to look like leather or fiber but actually conceals a nailed or screwed joint. Seating in rattan closely follows the pattern of seating in bamboo furniture.

You can always identify hand woven cane by looking at the underside of the seat.

Perhaps its wicker. Perhaps. Wicker furniture has been around for centuries and some of it is actually quite sturdy. Old wicker is made of small diameter (1/4 inch or less) but long lengths of willow or small rattan palms. These lengths are wrapped around a structural frame of maple or birch to create the impression of a woven piece of furniture which often features elaborate embellishments made of individual stems rolled or curled in patterns. This type of wicker furniture is all hand made and is relatively expensive. On the other hand is "paper" wicker. This is a 19th century invention of brown craft paper wrapped tightly around a wire core and can be woven on a special loom in a factory which accounts for the proliferation of Victorian wicker around the turn of the 20th century. But again, wicker is almost never used as seating material except in a wicker piece of furniture.

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