Wood materials incorporating new properties are of great interest, especially for advanced applications such as sustainable optics and photonics. In this work we describe a wood functionalization approach, comprising the incorporation of artificial chemiluminescent systems (phenyl oxalate ester‑hydrogen peroxide-fluorophore, and luminol-ferricyanide), resulting in light-emitting wood. By a detailed characterisation of the light emission features we point out the complex interaction between wood scaffold and chemiluminescent systems, especially the quenching effect of wood extractives (for the TCPO-H