+1 on Bill's answer.
I have friends in the woodcutting business who I used to ask to watch for green mineralized poplar. They would bring me logs and I would pay them and then pay to have them sawed up only to find that I had maybe a foot of green near the stump and plain old yellow poplar the rest of the way. That got expensive. Now I spend my time (my wife says way too much) at a furniture plant scrap wood pile looking for odds and ends. I probably look through 20 semi loads of scrap wood each year! The good part about that is that all their wood is kiln dried and planed. Right now I have enough purple poplar for two calls and I am about halfway through building them. The color is different, for sure, but I am worried about the sound because the wood feels extra light, even for poplar. Trouble is, you never know what kind of sound you are going to get until you finish the call! Rainbow poplar is pretty, but you would have to use it in big projects in order for it to be appreciated. Every now and then I get my hands on some small pieces of black poplar, too, enough to a scratch boxes. Maybe later I can post pictures of a black/green poplar call that I made this year.
