Can I ask about Elder and Silver Lime? It's so hard to find information about these wood types
Just so we are starting firmly in canon
Elder
The rarest wand wood of all, and reputed to be deeply unlucky, the elder wand is trickier to master than any other. It contains powerful magic, but scorns to remain with any owner who is not the superior of his or her company; it takes a remarkable wizard to keep the elder wand for any length of time. The old superstition, ‘wand of elder, never prosper,’ has its basis in this fear of the wand, but in fact, the superstition is baseless, and those foolish wandmakers who refuse to work with elder do so more because they doubt they will be able to sell their products than from fear of working with this wood. The truth is that only a highly unusual person will find their perfect match in elder, and on the rare occasion when such a pairing occurs, I take it as certain that the witch or wizard in question is marked out for a special destiny. An additional fact that I have unearthed during my long years of study is that the owners of elder wands almost always feel a powerful affinity with those chosen by rowan.
— Given that this is a very rare wood, it does not surprise me that there isn’t a lot of information about it. I personally have not worked with it. The one person I can remember talking about working with it noted that the smaller branches have a pith core. While this might make it easier to insert a magical core, it does present durability issues. If a solid wood wand is desired, this wouldn’t mean that it has to come from either a fairly large branch or the trunk proper. This in turn limits how much wood can be obtained from a tree.
Silver Lime
This unusual and highly attractive wand wood was greatly in vogue in the nineteenth century. Demand outstripped supply, and unscrupulous wandmakers dyed substandard woods in an effort to fool purchasers into believing that they had purchased silver lime. The reasons for these wands’ desirability lay not only in their unusually handsome appearance, but also because they had a reputation for performing best for Seers and those skilled in Legilimency, mysterious arts both, which consequently gave the possessor of a silver lime wand considerable status. When demand was at its height, wandmaker Arturo Cephalopos claimed that the association between silver lime and clairvoyance was ‘a falsehood circulated by merchants like Gerbold Ollivander (my own grandfather), who have overstocked their workshops with silver lime and hope to shift their surplus’. But Cephalopos was a slipshod wandmaker and an ignoramus, and nobody, Seer or not, was surprised when he went out of business.
— This is the canon description. If you are in the Old World, outside of the British Isles, you might look for this and related woods under the common name Linden. In North America, it is most commonly called Basswood. In any case these woods belong to the genus Tilia and are very very similar physically. Below the cut, I have included my own thoughts on the genus.
The canon description of silver lime has always puzzled me. Tilia woods are an off white when freshly worked and age to a pale tan or yellow, if unfinished. The grain is very faint, and the wood is light weight. This makes it a fantastic hand carving wood. It’s workability made it one of the premiere woods for carving in the medieval ages and today.
This workability could account for the “unusually handsome appearance” as a silver lime wand may have been exquisitely carved. But the fact that dye is mentioned as being used to trick people indicates that color not carving is the identifying factor. This is a might perplexing as I would not compare Tila’s color with tropical hardwoods valued for color like redheart, ebony, rosewood or canary wood. Nor would I compare it to temperate woods like black walnut, black cherry, Holly or yew.
With respect to arcane properties, I find these wands more aligned with protection, justice and the law, and healing. But that could be because I use basswood not Silver Lime.
