Debbie Bennett, age 12, of Peterboro, Ontario, Canada, for her question:

What is ebony made of?

Nature is lavish with blues and greens, with earthy browns and an assortment of rainbow colors. Lily whites are used sparingly, and in the world of nature true black is quite rare. One of nature's blackest blacks is the glossy ebony used to make the black keys on a piano.

Nowadays there are all kinds of fake ebony around. The gleaming blackness of polished ebony is very beautiful to behold, and our clever chemists have copied this outstanding color in several man made plastics and ebony black paints. But true ebony is not a synthetic substance. It is a gift of the generous plant world. There are at least 15 trees that belong to the ebony family and the handsome dark wood comes from deep inside their sturdy trunks.

The trees of the ebony family like climates that are tropical or at least warmish. Like all trees, they add new rings of boxy cells around the outside of their trunks every season. These new woody cells are very much alive. They busily carry moisture and rich sap up and down the tree. The outer rings of a tree are called sapwood and the sapwood of an ebony tree is very pale. It may be creamy white, pearly gray or tinged with pink. The oldest rings are in the center of a tree trunk. Their transportation duties are finished and their cells die, leaving only the hard, woody walls of their boxy cells. The center of a tree trunk is called the heartwood.

Ebony trees manufacture a special kind of dark, gummy resin that gathers in the lifeless heartwood. It fills the cells and seeps through their woody walls. In time it dries and becomes hard and brittle. This heartwood then becomes dark ebony. Some ebony trees produce heartwood of chocolate brown and in others it is streaked with variegated browns. A few special members of the family produce heartwood that is blacker than blackest midnight. These precious ebony trees thrive in southern India and Ceylon.

Ebony wood is brittle and rather easy to carve, and its surface can be polished to shine like glossy metal. Artists use it to make gleaming statues. Cabinet makers use it to create graceful inlaid designs in fine furniture. All kinds of ebony are valuable, but the most precious kind is jet black. It is used to make smooth and shiny piano keys and also handles for high priced carving knives and forks. Other knife handles and the heads of many golf clubs are made from dark brown and charcoal colored ebonies.

Various trees of the ebony family grow in Japan and the Philippines, in India and Ceylon, Africa and Madagascar and even in North and South America. Our member of the family is the persimmon tree that grows from Connecticut way south into Texas. It produces delicious persimmon fruits but its heartwood ebony is hardly worth men¬tioning. Its trunk never grows big enough to produce a sizable core of dark, dead heartwood. An old persimmon tree, however, may yield enough ebony to make glossy dark heads for a number of golf clubs.