from the same Black Limba flitch. Birmingham receives those grey-to-black veins against golden brown heartwood and puts them to work in a city whose architectural appetite was forged in iron and steel—here the dramatic figuring reads not as exotic ornament but as native intensity, the streaks darkening over time in Alabama humidity the way the city's own facades have deepened across decades. Where Billings asked the veneer to hold its own against open sky, Birmingham's interiors fold it into layered millwork where sapwood's pale greyish-brown edge can transition seamlessly into adjacent panels, the demarcation so subtle that a finished wall seems carved from a single living tree. It is precisely this adaptability that carries the species forward when Rosebud routes the next shipment north toward Bismarck, where the cold will slow that age-darkening process and the light will fall