Best firewood here is... madrone!
Out here in the west, Madrone is the king of firewood. Very dense wood that puts out a lot of heat for a long time. We also have madrone flooring in our house here... hard to get, only 2 mills cut it that I am aware of. Looks pretty though. My favorite available wood to burn here is alder. It is a medium weight aromatic hardwood and we have a lot of it. Mostly in the form of dead snags. It burns well even when it is wet, and it burns clean. It is also light enough to cut and lift easilly. Oak and maple can be heavy and hard work to cut.
Other than those... lets see... I live on 105 acres, 80 acres are in forest plan management. We have a good mix of species. Most of our stands are doug fir, as that is the money tree around here. It is a medium weight wood but it puts up a lot of creosote. I burn it in our outdoor wood boiler mixed in with alder with good results though. Grand fir is the next most common, but it is very light and does not have much heat value. Then we have California black oak, which is a very good and dense firewood, along with Oregon white oak (considered trash oak here). Then we have bigleaf and boxelder maples, and golden chinkapin. Both medium to heavy density, they burn very well. We have lots of red cedar and Oregon ash, but I have not burned any of those yet. We also have 6 types of willows... and black cottonwood. They are all light woods, and burn fast. They are good for starting a fire with and mixing in with oak and maple to get them burning. Burned alone they do not have that much heat value.
We also have pastures that were once part of a very large orchard. I have been cutting apple, pear, plum, hazlenut and walnut out of what is left of them. They all burn great. They make good fireplace wood and are fairly dense, and some of it puts out a pretty colored flame when burning. When I lived in California, one year we had access to free eucalyptus. Talk about impossible wood to cut when dry... and hard to burn. One log would last for days. My brother threw in some anthrosite coal once to keep it going, and we melted the fireplace grate it got so hot. :bang:
