Red Sandalwood

Red sandalwood, or red saunders, is the heartwood of Pterocarpus santalinus, a small tree of the legume family, Fabaceae, endemic to the southern Eastern Ghats of South India. Despite its name, which its Indian names share, it is no relation of the fragrant white sandalwood, Santalum album. The tree grows to about eight metres, quickly when young but killed by frost, with leaves of three leaflets, short sprays of yellow flowers and pods holding one or two seeds. Its wood is heavy and dense, reddish or blackish brown outside and a deep blood-red within, banded with paler red, and has only a faint smell. Its chief traditional use was as a dye: in India it was mixed with sappan wood to colour silk, cotton and wool, and pharmacists used its red colouring principle, santalin, to tint tinctures. In China the wood, called zitan, has long been prized for fine furniture, above all under the Qing dynasty. It has a place in traditional herbal medicine too, and Grieve records it as astringent and tonic, used medicinally chiefly in India. Because its timber fetches high prices the species has been overexploited, illegal trade remains a problem, and international trade is controlled under CITES Appendix II. In magic Cunningham assigns it to Venus, to water and to love: it is burned to draw love, and sprinkled about a place to cleanse it of negativity.