“Bushcraft” is the skill of living in the bush. This implies that your choice of materials is determined by your location, or what’s available around you. For bows, your top choices will be woods that are strongest in tension and compression. Most hardwoods make good bows.

• Hickory is a favorite due to its tension and compression strength and its availability. It is lighter than many weaker woods too.
• Red Oak is readily available, and can be as strong as Hickory in tension, although a little heavier. With Red Oak, the early season growth rings are easy to see contrasting with the late growth rings. This is beneficial to the bow maker.
• Maple is very strong and dense.
• Fruit trees are also great sources of bow wood. Any tree that grows slowly and bears big fruit is going to have very strong wood. Osage Orange is a fruit tree technically, and many of the American tribes used this wood for their bows. It’s not as easy to work as a straight hardwood sapling though.
• Large species of bamboo are great, but making bows from bamboo requires glue of some kind. The Japanese Yumi bows are made from bamboo using hide glue.

The general rule: avoid conifers, poplars and willows. Willow is a challenge, to say the least. It’s not a good performing wood. Softwoods, like Cedar, Pine, and most evergreens/conifers aside from Yew are not very strong in tension or compression. They can be used, but the bow will need to be long, and have very wide, flat limbs.

Arrows can be made of lighter softwoods like Spruce and Cedar. Spruce is easy to split into arrows due to its straight grain.

Bow strings can be made from sinew, rawhide, hemp, linen from flax, and silk.