Walnut. The one people picture. Chocolate heartwood, pale sapwood at the edges, and a grain that does something different every foot. It is also soft enough to dent with a car key, and it lightens over years rather than darkening, so the piece you get is the darkest it will ever be. Nobody warns you about that and then people think the finish faded.
Ash. Pale, straight, hard, cheap, and there is a great deal of it about because the borer killed so many. Ring porous, so the grain reads as strong parallel lines rather than swirl. If you want something that takes a beating in a hallway with boots and dogs, this is the answer, and it is the one I put my own bench in.
Hedge, which the books call Osage orange. Blazing yellow when it is cut and it will not stay that way. Inside two years of daylight it goes a deep russet brown and there is nothing you can do about it. It is also brutally hard, close to twice the hardness of oak, and it blunts everything. Fence posts made of it outlast the fence.
Cherry. Does the opposite of walnut: comes out pinkish and darkens to a deep red brown over five or six years, and it does it unevenly if half the piece sits in a sunbeam. Put a lamp base on a new cherry top and leave it a year and you will have a permanent pale circle. Move things around for the first summer.
Cedar. Not furniture wood in my shop. It is soft, it splits along the grain if you look at it wrong, and it smells like a chest because it is a chest. It is the right thing for boxes and the wrong thing for a bench, and I will say so if you ask for one.